Object-oriented programming allows us to organize our code in classes, encapsulating similar functionality together, and also allowing us clearly to separate internal from external methods. For example, we can design a class that has a method for reading data from a file, another method for removing outliers, and another one for selecting a subset of the columns. We can decide to keep all of these methods as public, meaning that we can access them from outside the class definition.

R supports object-oriented programming via S3 and S4 classes. The R6Class package, allows us to use R6 classes. These allow us to define our own classes in R in a very easy way. They also support inheritance, meaning that we can define a parent class and several derived classes that inherit from it. This implies that the derived classes can access all the methods and attributes from the parent class.

The central advantage of using inheritance is its simplification of the code (thus avoiding the duplication of functions). Also, using inheritance generates a structure in our code (where classes are connected via base/parent classes), which makes our code easier to read.