STA 9750 Week 3 Pre Assignment: Calculator Work with R

Due Date: 2024-09-11 (Wednesday) at 11:45pm

Submission: CUNY Brightspace

It is now time for us to start programming in R properly. In this week’s pre-assignment, we’re going to focus on three basic elements of programming in R:

  1. ‘Calculator Math’
  2. Function Calls
  3. Vectorized Semantics

Before we get into these however, let’s introduce the feedback mechanism used throughout this pre-assignment. Throughout this page, you will encounter blocks like the below:

The blank should be filled with 5

3 + 4 + 5 
3 + 4 + 5

Wait for the exercise to fully load (the blue dot next to Run Code will disappear) and then try giving correct and incorrect solutions.

  1. Replace the blank (underscores) with the number 5 and hit Run Code to check your solution. If all goes well, you’ll see a happy message.

  2. Now, replace the 5 with another number, e.g., 12. Hit Run Code again and see what the response you get.

These little code-blocks throughout this pre-assignment will be used to give similar feedback. You can always hit Show Solution to get the correct answer. The feedback engine is a bit overly picky at times, so if your answer is substantially similar to the official solution, I wouldn’t worry too much.

You will see the R output sometimes has a [1] before it. Don’t worry about that until you get to the section on vectorized semantics below.

Blocks that aren’t listed as “Exercise” are interactive snippets. Feel free to adjust the code to check your understanding.

Calculator Math with R

Let’s start by using R as a calculator. R implements all the basic operations of arithmetic:

  • a + b: (binary) addition \(a + b\)
  • a - b: (binary) subtraction \(a - b\)
  • *: (binary) multiplication \(ab\)
  • /: (binary) division \(a/b\)
  • -b: (unary) negation \(-b\)

You can type integers and decimals in the usual manner:

Compute \(5! = 5 * 4 * 3 * 2 * 1\) using R:

The blanks should be filled with 3 and 1

5 * 4 * 3 * 2 * 1 
5 * 4 * 3 * 2 * 1

Exponentials (powers) can be implemented with either a double star ** or a carrot ^:

I tend to prefer the carrot ^ as its one fewer character.

In general, R respects the standard “PEMDAS” order of operations:

  • Parentheses
  • Exponentiation
  • Multiplication and Division
  • Addition and Subtraction

So we can compute \(3 * (2 + 1)\) as:

Exercises

Compute the following algebraic expressions using R:

  1. \[3 * 2^2\]
3 * 2^2 
3 * 2^2
  1. \[(3 * 2)^2\]
(3 * 2)^2 
(3 * 2)^2
  1. \[3 + 2 - 1 + 4\]
3 + 2 - 1 + 4 
3 + 2 - 1 + 4
  1. \[3 + 2 - (1 + 4)\]
3 + 2 - (1 + 4) 
3 + 2 - (1 + 4)

Execution in RStudio

Now, redo these exercises in the RStudio Console. At each step, type the relevant code next to the > prompt and hit enter to execute the command.

R has greedy execution. When you hit enter, R tries its best to execute the whole line of code. If you enter an incomplete line of code, e.g., 3 +, R will change the > prompt to a + prompt, indicating there is more to be done.

Compare

with

In the first example, 3- is not a complete mathematical statement, so R knew there had to be more code and continued to await input. In the second, 3 is a perfectly valid (if very simple) mathematical command on its own, so R simply executes it as is.

Continuation prompts from dangling math are quite rare, but you will often find yourself in this scenario if you let parentheses become mismatched. If you are ever stuck and can’t figure out how to appease R, simply type Cntrl-C to “interrupt” the command and get back to the standard prompt.

Function Calls

R comes built in with a quite robust mathematical library. You can in general call a function like this:

(R also comes with the mathematical constant \(\pi\) pre-loaded.)

In general a function call is a “name” immediately followed by parentheses. If a function takes input or arguments, the input is located between the parentheses, separated by commas.

So above, cos(pi) implements the math \(\cos(\pi)\).

Useful built-in functions are:

  • sin - in radians
  • cos - in radians
  • exp - base \(e\) exponential
  • log - by default this is the natural logarithm (\(\ln\))
  • sqrt
  • abs - absolute value
  • factorial - \(n! = n * (n - 1) * (n - 2) * \dots * 3 * 2 * 1\)

Use the built-in functions to compute \(5!\):

factorial(5) 
factorial(5)

Exercises

Using these built-in functions, compute the following arithmetic expressions:

  1. \[\cos^2(\pi / 4)\]
cos(pi/4)^2 
cos(pi/4)^2
  1. \[e^{\log(\pi) + 3}\]
exp(log(pi) + 3) 
exp(log(pi) + 3)

Vectorized Semantics

A distinguishing feature of R is its vectorized semantics. By default, R wants to operate on collections of data - not individual values (scalars). You’ve seen some evidence of this already. Whenever you run a bit of math, R puts [1] at the front of the output. This is R helping you count the number of elements in the solution; it’s been pretty trivial so far, as all our calculations have returned a single number. But this is about to change!

The easiest vectors to create in R are sequences: e.g., the list of numbers from 1 to 10:

Here, our output is a vector of 10 elements. R still tells us where the vector starts (at the first element) but nothing else. Change this code to create the first 100 elements and read R’s output. Do you understand the output?

When R starts a new line of output, it tells you where you are in the vector. In RStudio, type letters to see the built-in vector of letters; this is a nice example of how the position information can be helpful in sorting through printed output.

By default, R operates on vectors elementwise:

Here the sqrt function is applied to each element separately.

When two vectors are combined, the operation also works elementwise:

(Note that the sequence operator (:) has higher precedence than most arithmetic so this does “what you’d expect.”)

Things get weird if the two vectors are of different lenghts:

Under the hood, R “recycles” 3 to be a vector of length 5 and then operators elementwise. That is, R computes

  • 3 + 1
  • 3 + 2
  • 3 + 3
  • 3 + 4
  • 3 + 5

and combines the results.

This in general gives useful results, but the results can be quite alarming if combining vectors of unaligned size:

Thankfully, R gives a warning that something weird happened. (This might seem annoying, but warnings are great! They help you find likely errors before anything too bad happens. Most experienced programmers wish R had more built-in warnings.)

It’s worth distinguishing warnings from errors. Errors occur when R absolutely cannot and will not execute your command:

In this case, it is impossible to add the number 3 to a letter, so R throws an error.

Warnings are hints of possible problems, but do not prevent execution. When dealing with external software and packages, you will often get warnings about old versions of software. These are encouraging you to update, but unless you see an error, things probably worked out ok.

Some of R’s built-in functions can be used to “summarize” a vector down to a single scalar (or, more precisely, a length 1 vector). These include sum, max, min, and mean. For example, we can compute the sum of the first 100 numbers as follows:

Apocryphally, a young C.F. Gauss did this calculation in his head to the great surprise of his school teacher. We might not have Gauss’s skills at arithmetic, but we can do quite a lot with R.

For example, the famous “Bessel problem” of mathematics is to compute

\[ \sum_{n=1}^{\infty} \frac{1}{n^2} = 1 + \frac{1}{2^2} + \frac{1}{3^2} + \dots\]

Euler showed, somewhat remarkably, that the answer is \(\pi^2 / 6\). We won’t repeat Euler’s analysis here, but let’s confirm it using R.

Pretty good alignment!

Do you understand everything that happened here? If so, you’re ready for next week’s class. Go ahead and fill out this week’s Brightspace quiz.