R for Health Data Research

Beginner, Intermediate and Advanced

Dr Ewan Carr

Department of Biostatistics & Health Informatics
King’s College London

Course materials 📖

All lectures and practicals can be found at the link below:

ewancarr.github.io/hdr-november-2025

Updated throughout the course and available for at least one month after the final session.

Submit your questions 🙋

Click the “Submit a question” link to send me questions during the week. (I won’t check this during the live session).

Each Friday, I will answer any questions received with a short video.

Optional homework 📝

• The sessions are spread over four weeks, allowing time for the material to sink in before moving on.
• Some practicals will contain more exercises than we have time for during class.
• If you have time, you may want to attempt these in your own time, before the next class.

Learning a new programming

language is hard.

Especially when you’re used to another way of working (e.g., Stata, SPSS or Python).

I tried to learn R five times before it stuck.

Expectations 💡

• Expect confusion. It’s inevitable; you’re not doing anything wrong.
• Mistakes are normal, even after many years of using R.
• Allow time; things will take (much) longer at first.
• It can help to use R for a specific project, before switching completely.

After 16 years of using R, I still:

• Regularly make mistakes
• Have to look things up, check the documentation
• Spend forever tweaking code, and running endless tests, only to discover in the end that the entire problem was caused by a single comma out of place 😭

What this course is about ✅

• Building confidence in using R for health data science
• Learning to write, run, and understand R code
• Working with complex, real-world data — importing, tidying, transforming, and summarising
• Developing efficient, reproducible workflows in R
• Moving toward modern, professional programming practice

What this course is not about ❌

• Statistical modelling or inference
• Hypothesis tests, regression, or prediction modelling
• Detailed coverage of specific statistical packages

I’ll touch on these where relevant, but we won’t teach advanced statistics here.

How this course will run ⚙️

This is a large class with a mix of lectures and practical sessions.

During the Lectures 🎓

• Post questions in the chat.

  (You can message me directly, or the whole class).

• Listen or type along — whatever works best for you.

During the practicals 💻

• Post questions in the chat or put a hand up.
• You’re welcome to unmute and share screen.
• I’ll use messages in the chat to check progress.
• I’ll go through the exercises at the end.

After the sessions 🕐

• Review material and lecture recordings.
• If you want, have a go at the homework.
• Send me your questions for the Q&A.

Every question
is helpful

Someone else is almost certainly wondering the same thing.

Learning R is a journey

“If I take one more step, it’ll be the farthest away from home I’ve ever been.”