R
The R language is widely used among statisticians and data miners for developing statistical software and data analysis. Nowadays, R and Python are both part of a typical data science workflow.
See Why you should learn R first for data science.
For downloading latest version of R, adding additional repositories to debian repository list is required.
For a backport of latest R to Debian 8 (jessie), simply open /etc/apt/sourece.list.
$ sudo vim /etc/apt/source.listThen add following lines into /etc/apt/sourece.list.
deb http://<favourite-cran-mirror>/bin/linux/debian jessie-cran3/ deb-src http://<favourite-cran-mirror>/bin/linux/debian jessie-cran3/NOTE: You need to substitute
<favourite-cran-mirror>by one of the mirror URLs listed in the mirror list.
For example:deb http://cran.csie.ntu.edu.tw/bin/linux/debian jessie-cran3/.Fetch and import Debian backports archives on CRAN (CRAN Debian archive) with key ID 381BA480.
$ sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keys.gnupg.net --recv-key 381BA480Finally, install R.
$ sudo apt-get update $ sudo apt-get install r-base r-base-devAfter the installation, execute this command to check the version of R in your server is up-to-date.
$ R --version
Useful R packages
One feature of R is its capabilities to extend through third-party packages. Currently, the CRAN package repository features 7749 available packages (2015-01-09). There are also many Task Views for R users to browse packages for differenct area of interest.
We will introduce some useful packages here.
plyr/dplyr: Fast, consistent tools for data manipulating, both
in or out of memory.
data.table: An extension of data.frame for large data.
ggplot2: A plotting system for R, based on the grammar of graphics.
spatstat: Spatial statistics focusing on spatial point patterns.
installr: Make updating R (on windows) as easy as running a function.
rmarkdown: Enable easy creation of dynamic documents,
presentations, and reports from R.
DBI: A database interface for communication between R and relational
database management systems.