Dagu Conducting Workshop on R-commander

The Dagu Project which operates under the Ethiopian Public Health’s (EPHI) Health Systems and Reproductive Health Directorate is conducting a workshop on R-commander (Statistics with R) for Dagu PhD candidates starting from March 26 to 30, 2018.
On workshop which aims to familiarize the participants with R-commander and how to use R-commander for statistical analyses, data management and visualizing; PhD candidates drawn from Jimma, Gondar, Hawassa and Mekelle University and EPHI are participating.
The organizers explained that in the data management session importing data into R-commander and how to use R-commander for statistical analyses; while in the visualization portion to produce histograms, bar graphs and scatterplots will be covered. The courses consist a series of interactive lectures combined with computer labs.
Associate Professor Katarina Selling and Senior Statistician Jonas Selling from Uppsala University of Sweden are the facilitators of the workshop.
According to the facilitators’ explanation, “R” is a powerful and comprehensive program to analyze and visualize data. A major advantage with R is that it is open-source software, and therefore, new statistical methods are implemented in R first. Since R is a programming language, users have to learn how to write code, which is a substantial threshold form, many. However, when R is used in conjunction with “R-commander” (“Rcmdr”) it also comes with a simpler user interface that is similar to other menu-based statistical software. Thus, R-commander serves the important role as a bridge for users who want to learn to write code in R but do not have the time or opportunity to approach this from scratch.