Which R documents to read, and which R packages to use

There are lots of R documents and over 3000 R packages. Which documents to start with and which R packages to use are questions faced by many people.

If you are new to R, an Introduction to R can be a good reference to start with, which is available at CRAN website. After that, you may want to know more details about R Language and data access, and they are documented respectively by the R Language Definition and R Data Import/Export at CRAN website.

If you prefer to learn R with examples, two excellent online resources are
– Quick-R for SAS/SPSS/Stata Users, and
– R Tutorial.

Getting lost in  over 3000 R packages? Which R packages to use? CRAN Task Views are a good guidance. They provide collections of packages for different tasks. Some task views related to data mining are:
– CRAN Task View: Machine Learning & Statistical Learning,
– CRAN Task View: Cluster Analysis & Finite Mixture Models,
– CRAN Task View: Time Series Analysis,
– CRAN Task View: Multivariate Statistics, and
– CRAN Task View: Analysis of Spatial Data.

If you want to know which R functions and packages can be used for your data mining applications, R Reference Card for Data Mining will be helpful to you, which is available at RDataMining website <http://www.rdatamining.com>, as well as CRAN website.

Regards
Yanchang Zhao
PhD, Data Miner
Email: yanchang (at) rdatamining.com
RDataMining: http://www.rdatamining.com