Introduction to Julia for Statisticians

R is widely used for statistics and data analysis, but Julia offers high performance with a user-friendly syntax, making it an appealing alternative. This talk explores how statisticians can benefit from Julia, get started with it, and integrate it with R.
Published

September 2, 2025

Many statisticians and data scientists use R to implement methodologies and analyse data. Though R is sufficient for many tasks, there may be some occasions where there is a need for another, perhaps faster, programming language. One option is Julia. Julia is a high-level, high-performance programming language, which can achieve speeds comparable to low-level languages like C while maintaining a user-friendly syntax. It has a growing ecosystem of data science and statistical programming capabilities, making it an increasingly attractive alternative to R. This talk will aim to address three questions: