R demos for presentation

Question

I know this is barely programming related, but I'll have to show some intuitive, straightforward and possibly very appealing R presentation so that a department at my current institution will start to evaluate its adoption. Does anyone of you know any R script that shows the power, simplicity and flexibility of R? I'm looking especially for scripts belonging to two categories:

• easy code showing how quick it is to calculate descriptives, basic plots like barchart, boxplots, simple linear regression - all of that concisely and beautifully
• code showing fancy visualizations of complex multivariate datasets (ie. heatmaps etc)

Interactivity for scripts belonging to the second category is a plus.

Of course having data to use with the scripts would also be appreciated ;)

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

Quick-R is a nice site for some examples on how you can easilly do a ton of useful stuff in R:

http://www.statmethods.net/

---

For fancy visualizations, check out some of the examples from my package qgraph:)

http://sites.google.com/site/qgraphproject/examples

Most of those pictures are included in the help files ( ?qgraph.pca, ?qgraph.efa )

And of course check out examples from ggplot2

Answer 2

The demo() command is your friend. Use the ones for lattice and ggplot2 and you'll soon convert people to R through the extremely high quality graphics.

Answer 3

I've done similar things, and here are some things that I included as good examples;

• Grabbing data from a Wikipedia page, process and display a graph of the explosion in colours of Crayola crayons since they were introduced, all in thirty lines of code (http://www.r-bloggers.com/ggplot2-crayola-crayon-colours/)
• Showing the exponential rise of R packages on CRAN over time (http://journal.r-project.org/archive/2009-2/RJournal_2009-2_Fox.pdf)
• How the New York Times used R to create an amazing infographic showing the hits of Michael Jackson in the three hours after his death (http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/06/25/arts/0625-jackson-graphic.html)
• Pretty much any of the examples for ggplot2, because of my area of expertise, I often do these (http://had.co.nz/ggplot2/)

I shoe-horned most of these, and a few work-specific ones into a Sweave file that used the Beamer Poster styles to produce a scientific poster that compiles itself, and can pull current datasets every time, which always seems to impress.

Answer 4

And let's not forget the googleVis package (an R interface to the Google Visualization API), to produce cool motion-charts (as seen in the "Joy of Stats" videos by Hans Rosling) with just a couple lines of code. Although perhaps not directly relevant to what the original question asked for, showing that R now has a spiffy IDE called RStudio can also help convince people to adopt R, especially those who think that Matlab has a nice editor and R doesn't.

Answer 5

The AniWiki web site containing a gallery of statistical animations produced using the animation package by Yihui Xie could be of some use to you.

Answer 6

Faraway's book has tons of great code you can copy and paste in, appendix C seems to be what you need to start out

http://cran.r-project.org/doc/contrib/Faraway-PRA.pdf

Answer 7

I had a similar discussion How to market R at your institute? first here at SO which was moved later on to programmers. Maybe it's not as concrete as this one, but still you might find some synergies.