Every year, the Leuven Statistics Research Center (Belgium) is offering short courses for professionals and researchers in statistics and statistical tools.

The following link shows the overview of the courses: http://lstat.kuleuven.be/consulting/shortcourses/ENcourse%20overview.htm or get it here in pdf: http://lstat.kuleuven.be/consulting/shortcourses/BRO_LSTAT_2012-2013.pdf

This year, BNOSAC is presenting the course on Advanced R Programming Topics, which will be held on Oktober 18-19.

This course is a hands-on course covering the basic toolkit you need to have in order to use R efficiently for data analysis tasks. It is an intermediate course aimed at users who have the knowledge from the course 'Essential tools for R' and who want to go further to improve and speed up their data analysis tasks.

The following topics will be covered in detail

– The apply family of functions and basic parallel programming for these, vectorisation, regular expressions, string manipulation functions and commonly used functions from the base package. Useful other packages for data manipulation.

– Making a basic reproducible report using Sweave and knitr including tables, graphs and literate programming

– If you want to build your own R package to distribute your work, you need to understand S3 and S4 methods, you need the basics of how generics work as well as R environments, what are namespaces and how are they useful. This will be covered to help you start up and build an R package.

– Basic tips on how to organise and develop R code and test it.

You can subscribe here:

http://lstat.kuleuven.be/consulting/shortcourses/subscription.htm