In this chapter, we will introduce a wide array of topics regarding statistics and data analysis in R. We will use quite a diverse set of packages, most of which have been released over recent years.

We'll start by generating random numbers, fitting distributions to data, and using several packages to plot data. We will then move onto sampling, creating diagrams with the DiagrammeR package, and analyzing sequence data with the TraMineR package. We also present several techniques, not strictly related to statistics, but important for dealing with advanced methods in R—we introduce the Rcpp package (used for embedding highly efficient C++ code into your R scripts) and the R6 package (used for operating with R6 classes, allowing you to code using an object-oriented approach in R).