Appendix Introduction to R
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 November 2012
Summary
Overview
R is a software package for statistical computation and graphics. It is free and open-source and very flexible. It implements many modern statistical methods with good graphical support. The core of R is an interpreted computer language which allows branching and looping as well as modular programming using functions. It can be downloaded for different operating systems from the main website http://www.r-project.org/, which also contains links to manuals and documentation. For example, a relatively concise introduction to R is available at http://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/R-intro.pdf.
The R language is enhanced by numerous libraries. For the purposes of spatial statistics, the spatstat library has been developed. It supports the following:
Creation, manipulation, and plotting of point patterns
Exploratory data analysis, including intensity maps, empty space functions, nearest-neighbor distance functions, and K, L, and J functions
Model fitting
All figures with point patterns in this book were created using the powerful commands of the spatstat library. To use it, it needs to be loaded after starting R by typing library(spatstat). A demo can be run by demo(spatstat), while typing help(spatstat) provides a help page. An introduction to spatstat is given in Baddeley & Turner (2005), and further documentation is available at www.spatstat.org.
R is equipped with all standard data types, such as scalars, vectors, arrays, and lists. Additional spatstat data types are point patterns and windows. A point pattern records the locations of the points observed in a certain region, and a window is a region in a two-dimensional space representing the “study area.”
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- Stochastic Geometry for Wireless Networks , pp. 272 - 274Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2012