About the series

This is an intermediate-level series on R on data manipulation in R, focusing on methods for merging and reshaping data. It will offer both base-R and tidyverse solutions. The series assumes some prior exposure to base R (such as through the prior series, A Slower Introduction to R).

The series will draw on data examples from the health sciences (including public health and medicine). 

Each session (scheduled for 1.5 hours, but we may finish earlier on occasion) will involve short mini lectures, interspersed with hands-on exercises.

Registration for each session requires UCSF MyAccess credentials.

The CLE for this series is available here. 

About this session

Each session is titled in the form of a "How can I..." question. This second session is titled "How can I get create categorical variables?" and will revisit three scenarios from Session 7 of A Slower Introduction to R, offering two additional approaches (dplyr and a similar approach). The three scenarios are:

• labeling groups
• combining groups
• categorizing continuous variables

Participants are strongly encouraged to review the prior session and Session 7 from A Slower Introduction to R.

About the instructor

The instructor, Yea-Hung Chen, PhD, MS, has 10 years of experience teaching R to the UCSF community. He designed and taught UCSF's first-ever R course (Biostat 213) and taught the introductory biostatistics course for UCSF's MS in Global Health program (GHS 207). 

Accessibility statement

Slides will be available on the Course Learning Environment at least 24 hours prior to each session. Learners are welcome to use recording or closed-captioning features embedded in the Zoom platform. To request reasonable accommodation for this session, please email the instructor (yea-hung.chen@ucsf.edu) as soon as possible.