2.1 Getting RStudio to run on your computer
As a prerequisite for this guide, you need to have RStudio and a few essential R packages installed.
You have to follow these steps to get your RStudio set.
- Download RStudio on the RStudio Website (Link). It’s free!
- If you do not have R installed yet, you will have to install the latest R Version before you can use RStudio. You can get the latest R version here.
- Once RStudio is running, open the Console on the bottom left corner of your screen.
- We will now install a few packages using R Code. Here’s an overview of the packages, and why we need them:
| Package | Description |
|---|---|
| tidyverse | This is a large package containing various functions to tidy up your data |
| metaforest | This package is used to explore heterogeneity using the random forests algorithm. It also installs the R-package ‘metafor’, which is one of the most commonly used meta-analysis packages. |
| caret | This package is an all-purpose machine learning interface, which we will use for model tuning in the chapter on MetaForest. |
5. To install these packages, we use the install.packages() function in R. One package after another, our code should look like this:
install.packages("tidyverse")
install.packages("meta")
# To install the 'metaforest' package, we use the development version,
# which contains some functions for this course.
# First, install the 'devtools' package, which allows you to install packages
# directly from github
install.packages("devtools")
# Load the devtools package
library(devtools)
# Install metaforest from github:
install_github("cjvanlissa/metaforest")
Don’t forget to put the packages in "".
Otherwise, you will get an error message.