Knoxville R Users Group Formed, Free Training Offered

R is popular free and open-source software for graphics and data analytics. The Knoxville R Users Group is being formed to help people learn R and improve their skills with it. Three departments of The University of Tennessee are working together to get it started: the Office of Information Technology, the National Institute for Computational Science’s RDAV group (Remote Data Analysis and Visualization) and the Department of Statistics, Operations, and Management Science. The latter’s Business Analytics program was recently ranked among the top 20 such departments in the U.S.

To start the group off I’ll teach a hands-on introductory workshop on R on April 29th from 8 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.  The topics covered are described at http://r4stats.com/workshops/r4sas-spss-stata/. Note that you do not need to know SAS, SPSS or Stata, but the workshop will include numerous warnings where R works very differently from those other packages. The workshop is free and open to the Knoxville area public. UT faculty, staff and students can register at: http://oit.utk.edu/training and non-UT people can register at the user group web site: http://www.meetup.com/Knoxville-R-Users-Group. Course location, materials including slides, programs, practice data sets and exercises will be available on http://www.meetup.com/Knoxville-R-Users-Group on Saturday, April 27 (if not before).