An Introduction to R, plus a discussion of what we want out of this group.

R (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_%28programming_language%29) is an open source programming language for statistical computing, data analysis and graphical visualization (it generates beautiful charts very easily!). It is the de facto standard for statistical computing in academia and is becoming increasingly popular with commercial users in areas such as business intelligence, predictive analytics, data mining, machine learning, computational biology and quantitative finance.

While R has an estimated 1 million users globally, the local Vancouver user base appears to be quite small. Thus, this group will initially be focused on introductory topics and how to use R's libraries with more mainstream programming languages (particularly visualization/charting libraries). Once we've gained some members and momentum we'll graduate to more advanced topics and applications.

Have a look at the very active 'Bay Area useR Group' for ideas of what we could cover / discuss in future meetings (https://www.meetup.com/R-Users/).