Summary and Setup

Learning Objectives

Describe the importance of efficient and reproducible data QA/QC
Identify common data errors and quality issues
Develop a QA/QC strategy for a tabular data set
Import data into R and QA/QC using default data types
Implement an R script to perform data QA/QC on a tabular data set
Document and communicate data QA/QC steps for data reporting

Prerequisite

This lesson assumes you have R and RStudio installed on your computer. R and RStudio are two separate pieces of software:

R is a programming language and software used to run code written in R.
RStudio is an integrated development environment (IDE) that makes using R easier. In this course we use RStudio to interact with R.

If you don’t already have R and RStudio installed, follow the instructions for your operating system below. You have to install R before you install RStudio.

Installing R and RStudio

Download R from the CRAN website.
Run the .exe file that was just downloaded
Go to the RStudio download page
Under Installers select Windows Vista 10/11 - RSTUDIO-xxxx.yy.z-zzz.exe (where x = year, y = month, and z represent version numbers)
Double click the file to install it
Once it’s installed, open RStudio to make sure it works and you don’t get any error messages.

Download R from the CRAN website.
Select the .pkg file for the latest R version
Double click on the downloaded file to install R
It is also a good idea to install XQuartz (needed by some packages)
Go to the RStudio download page
Under Installers select Mac OS 13+ - RSTUDIO-xxxx.yy.z-zzz.dmg (where x = year, y = month, and z represent version numbers)
Double click the file to install RStudio
Once it’s installed, open RStudio to make sure it works and you don’t get any error messages.

Download R from the CRAN website.
Select the .pkg file for the latest R version
Double click on the downloaded file to install R
It is also a good idea to install XQuartz (needed by some packages)
Go to the RStudio download page
Under Installers select Your Version of Linux - RSTUDIO-xxxx.yy.z-zzz.dmg (where x = year, y = month, and z represent version numbers)
Double click the file to install RStudio
Once it’s installed, open RStudio to make sure it works and you don’t get any error messages.

FIXME: Setup instructions live in this document. Please specify the tools and the data sets the Learner needs to have installed.

Data Sets

Download the data zip file and unzip it to your Desktop

Software Setup

Details

Setup for different systems can be presented in dropdown menus via a spoiler tag. They will join to this discussion block, so you can give a general overview of the software used in this lesson here and fill out the individual operating systems (and potentially add more, e.g. online setup) in the solutions blocks.

Windows

Use PuTTY

MacOS

Use Terminal.app

Linux

Use Terminal