R for Biostatistics

A One-Week Boot Camp for incoming graduate students

Welcome

This is the online version of R for Biostatistics: A One-Week Boot Camp by The rgtlab Curriculum Project, a short preparatory course for incoming graduate students in biostatistics and adjacent programmes.

The book covers everything an entering masters-level biostatistician needs to be functional in R on day one of the academic programme: installation, basic syntax, data manipulation with the tidyverse, visualisation with ggplot2, simple statistics, and the minimum viable reproducibility setup. It is designed for five consecutive days of work: one hour of lecture content each day, two hours of homework, no examinations.

The boot camp is the entry point to a five-volume graduate sequence:

• R for Biostatistics: A One-Week Boot Camp (this volume) — pre-program preparation.
• Biostatistics Practicum — workflow infrastructure (Git, Docker, renv, Quarto, CDISC).
• Statistical Computing in the Age of AI — introductory methods (linear models, GLM, mixed models, survival, Bayesian, bootstrap, simulation).
• Advanced Statistical Computing in the Age of AI — advanced computing (numerical stability, MCMC, HPC, high-dimensional methods, ML, software engineering).
• Applied Generative AI for Health Sciences Research — capability classes, RAG, agents, evaluation, regulation, deployment.

See the Preface for the design rationale and the Conventions page for visual cues.

License

This book is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International.

Code samples are licensed under Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal, i.e. public domain.