Chapter 1 Introduction

1.1 Preface

I started this online book as background material for the course Network Analysis and from the need to teach social science students (which includes Business Administration and Economics students) the a basic understanding of R, network techniques and the intuition behing applying linear regression. I intend to work on this book on the fly meaning that during courses I try to see what the needs of students really are. Moreover, over the coming years I intend to add additional chapters, specifically about the use of stated preference modeling–and its corresponding logit estimation–and working with geographical data. Obviously, all in R. At the moment this book still has not yet passed its infant stage. Therefore, all input in the form of additions, comments, critique and remarks are highly appreciated.

1.2 Where to get R

First, you need to install R itself. You can do this by downloading this from CRAN (we choose here the server from the Netherlands). Choose your appropriate operating system, choose the base system, download R and install it. That’s it!

The base distribution of R comes with a built-in editor, where you can write your script (more about scripts in subsection 3.2.1). This editor is however very basic. Therefore, it is very much advised that you download and install the free editor RStudio as well. Again, choose your operating system and just install the latest version. The very short video (1.5 minutes) on RStudio’s website gives an overview of the basic features (it can do quite some more stuff).

1.3 Structure of the book

In its present state, the book contains four chapters dealing with contents. The first chapter gives a justification for all this. The second chapter concerns the basic usage of R. The third deals with the fundamentals behind regression analysis and how to apply it in R. The fourth chapter lays out how to do network analysis in R.