Data analysis using the Gnu R system for statistical computation

Abstract

R is a language system for statistical computation. It is widely used in statistics, bioinformatics, machine learning, data mining, quantitative finance, and the analysis of clinical drug trials. Among the advantages of R are: it has become the standard language for developing statistical techniques, it is being actively developed by a large and growing global user community, it is open source software, it is highly portable (Linux, OS-X and Windows), it has a built-in documentation system, it produces high quality graphics and it is easily extensible with over four thousand extension library packages available covering statistics and applications. This report gives a very brief introduction to R with some examples using lattice QCD simulation results. It then discusses the development of R packages designed for chi-square minimization fits for lattice n-pt correlation functions.