Intermediate R for Finance

Learn about how dates work in R, and explore the world of if statements, loops, and functions using financial examples.

If you enjoyed the Introduction to R for Finance course, then you will love Intermediate R for Finance. Here, you will first learn the basics about how dates work in R, an important skill for the rest of the course. Your next step will be to explore the world of if statements, loops, and functions. These are powerful ideas that are essential to any financial data scientist's toolkit. Finally, we will spend some time working with the family of apply functions as a vectorized alternative to loops. And of course, all examples will be finance related! Enjoy!

• Dates
• Welcome! Before we go deeper into the world of R, it will be nice to have an understanding of how dates and times are created. This chapter will teach you enough to begin working with dates, but only scratches the surface of what you can do with them.
• If Statements and Operators
• Imagine you own stock in a company. If the stock goes above a certain price, you might want to sell. If the stock drops below a certain price, you might want to buy it while it's cheap! This kind of thinking can be implemented using operators and if statements. In this chapter, you will learn all about them, and create a program that tells you to buy or sell a stock.
• Loops
• Loops can be useful for doing the same operation to each element of your data structure. In this chapter you will learn all about repeat, while, and for loops!
• Functions
• If data structures like data frames and vectors are how you hold your data, functions are how you tell R what to do with your data. In this chapter, you will learn about using built-in functions, creating your own unique functions, and you will finish off with a brief introduction to packages.
• Apply
• A popular alternative to loops in R are the apply functions. These are often more readable than loops, and are incredibly useful for scaling the data science workflow to perform a complicated calculation on any number of observations. Learn about them here!