Bayesian Statistics and Marketing, 2nd Edition

Appendix AAn Introduction to R and bayesm

In order to facilitate computation of the models in this book, we created a set of programs written in R and C++. R is a general purpose programming and statistical analysis system. R is free and available on the web. We have made our suite of programs into what is called an R “package.” Our package is named bayesm. This package is easy to download and install from within R and is thoroughly documented, including test examples and illustrative datasets.

This appendix provides an introduction to the R environment and bayesm. In addition, there are many excellent books and video tutorials available on the R environment and RStudio enhancements.

A.1 SETTING UP THE R ENVIRONMENT AND BAYESM

Virtually, all users of the R statistical language use the RStudio Integrated Development environment (IDE). RStudio works on top of R and provides a convenient visual and programming interface. Of particular interest is that RStudio provides a graphical interface that makes R programming and package installation very convenient. RStudio provides a very nice code development environment, which includes dynamic syntax checking of R code and integration of the interface with C++. RStudio also supports a very wide variety of enhancements to the basic R interface including dynamic report generation using Rmarkdown.

A.1.1 Obtaining R

Visit http://cran.r-project.org/ or google “R language.” CRAN is a network of mirror sites that allow you to download precompiled ...