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Loading libraries

So far everything we've done has used 'base R', but many useful functions can be found in libraries. In particular there are a set of libraries known as the 'tidyverse' that we find extremely useful, and which we recommend using.

Full documentation for this package can be found on the tidyverse website. During this course there are four bits we'll use in particular:

  • We'll use the functions like read_tsv() to read in data - because they are a bit better than the R builtin functions.
  • We'll use the tidyverse tibble data type, instead of R built in data frames.
  • We'll also use the functions from dplyr() to easily manipulate data.
  • And we'll use ggplot2, which is an advanced library for plotting.

For the purpose of this tutorial we'll use tidyverse to load in and look at some data. to do this we first need to install it, and then load it them into your running R session.

Installing libraries​

To install a library, all we need is a single call:

> install.packages( name of library goes here )

So to install tidyverse:

> install.packages( 'tidyverse' )

Note. here you give the name of the package in quotes.

The package will be downloaded from the R pacakge repository, known as CRAN. In fact when you run it, R might first ask which 'CRAN mirror' you wish to download from. It will then split out a bunch of stuff showing that it is downloading and installing the package. For example, when I ran it, the output ended like this:

The downloaded binary packages are in
    /var/folders/1j/6glxfbj173d604n6mx1zh30c0000gn/T//RtmprydQG6/downloaded_packages

This indicates the package was successfully downloaded and installed.

Note

So where has it been installed? This depends on your system. For example on my system (which is a mac) it winds up in:

/Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Versions/4.2-arm64/Resources/library

On the other hand it is also likely to be in an R/ directory in your home directory - you could see the contents this way:

> dir( "~/R/", recursive = TRUE )
``

The exact location on your system is given by the `.libPaths()` function.

## Loading libraries

To load a library into your running R session, use library():

library( tidyverse )

Note that unlike for install.packages() here you do not put quotes around the library name.

You will probably see a message, something like this:

── Attaching core tidyverse packages ─────────────────────── tidyverse 2.0.0 ──
✔ dplyr     1.1.3     ✔ readr     2.1.4
✔ forcats   1.0.0     ✔ stringr   1.5.0
✔ ggplot2   3.4.3     ✔ tibble    3.2.1
✔ lubridate 1.9.3     ✔ tidyr     1.3.0
✔ purrr     1.0.2     
── Conflicts ───────────────────────────────────────── tidyverse_conflicts() ──
✖ dplyr::filter() masks stats::filter()
✖ dplyr::lag()    masks stats::lag()
ℹ Use the conflicted package to force all conflicts to become errors

Don't worry - this is normal! Tidyverse is in fact a large meta-package - a collection of other packages that work together. (You can also load any of those component libraries individually, if you wanted to.)

This message is telling you what you've installed, and making a couple of warnings about functions that have been overridden by the new package. We'll generally want the tidyverse versions of functions like filter(), so this is fine.

Once you have the tidyverse installed, let's use it to look at some data.