Go to Tools -> Global Options -> Code -> Copilot. You can enable or disable Copilot in R Studio. Log-in to your own account.
Alternatively, VS Code is another excellent tool with Copilot integrated. To setup VS Code and use that for completing the R homework, the best guild to follow is this one provide on the official website of VS Code. The following steps are essential:
languageserver
packages, using
install.packages("languageserver")
in the R console.rmarkdown
, knitr
.VS Code allows more enhanced features, such as Copilot, which is a AI assistant that helps you write code. To enable this feature, you need to install the GitHub Copilot extension. However, this is a paid feature that requires a GitHub account and a subscription to GitHub Copilot. Please note that using this feature is not prohibited in this course, but you should be aware of the potential risks (whatever that might be) since this is an experimental feature.
Using R Markdown in VS Code is very similar to using it in RStudio.
You can create a new R Markdown file by clicking the
New File
button on the top left corner of the VS Code
window, and then select R Markdown
from the drop-down menu.
You can also create a new R Markdown file by clicking File
-> New File
-> R Markdown
.
This paragraph above was actually generated by Copilot with the
prompt Using R Markdown in
. And it didn’t mention that you
can get a free subscription with the GitHub education program as
a student.
Here’s an example of a code chunk that plots the iris dataset. Again the code was completed by Copilot.
# load the iris dataset
data(iris)
# plot the iris dataset, with color indicating species
# and also use solid dots
plot(iris$Sepal.Length, iris$Sepal.Width,
main = "Iris Dataset",
xlab = "Sepal Length", ylab = "Sepal Width",
col = iris$Species, pch = 19)
However, I did a few attempts before I got the code I want. Hence, you should always check the code generated by Copilot before you run it. For example, I wanted to generate a data matrix with correlated data such that the covariance matrix has 0.5 on the off-diagonal entries. Copilot failed this task.
# Generate a data matrix with 100 rows and 4 columns
# with covariance matrix 0.5 on off-diagonal entries
# and 1 on diagonal entries
set.seed(123)
x <- matrix(rnorm(400), nrow = 100, ncol = 4)
x <- x %*% t(x)
diag(x) <- 1
x <- x / max(x)
Instead the corrected code should be
# define a matrix with 0.5 on off-diagonal entries and 1 on diagonal entries
S <- matrix(0.5, nrow = 4, ncol = 4)
diag(S) <- 1
# generate 100 random samples from a multivariate normal distribution
# with mean 0 and covariance matrix S
set.seed(123)
x <- MASS::mvrnorm(100, mu = rep(0, 4), Sigma = S)
# calculate the sample covariance matrix
cov(x)
## [,1] [,2] [,3] [,4]
## [1,] 0.9137519 0.3503305 0.4356605 0.4680046
## [2,] 0.3503305 0.7738285 0.3197805 0.4123654
## [3,] 0.4356605 0.3197805 0.9108208 0.4093817
## [4,] 0.4680046 0.4123654 0.4093817 0.9428806
There were some issues I have encountered while using VS Code for RMarkdown files (I am using windows). At the beginning it could be frustrating, but after a few tries, I was able to solve most of them. Here are some of the issues I have encountered and how I solved them. You may encounter different issues. If you are not able to solve the problem, I would recommend switching to RStudio.
Background Process
and it was able to render. I have not
found a better solution yet. If you know a better solution, please let
me know.options(radian.auto_match = FALSE)
.