2.9 Installing Rattle on Windows

If you come across any problems installing Rattle on Windows see Section 2.12.

For Windows we need to first install R. Below are the steps to follow to augment the details from Section 2.1 and Section 2.3. A key part of this is to update what is called an environment variable with the name PATH. This is to tell Windows the location where you have installed R so that Rattle can find R.

  • Visit https://cloud.r-project.org/ and navigate to Windows install;
  • Click on Download R for Windows and then install R for the first time and then the Download R-n.n.n for Windows (noting the version number n.n.n will be something like 4.4.1, for example);
  • Open the downloaded exe file and install R with all defaults into C:\Program Files\R\R-n.n.n;
  • Add C:\Program Files\R\R-n.n.n\bin to the PATH environment variable:
    • Open Control Panel and choose Edit the system environment variables;
    • Click Environment Variables…;
    • Under User variables for … click the Path entry and then Edit…;
    • Click New and then add C:\Program Files\R\R-4.4.1\bin;
    • Click OK a few times to close the windows.
  • Start a Command Prompt, run R, and install the requisit R packages with the install.packages() command:
install.packages(c("Hmisc", "VIM", "corrplot", "descr", "fBasics",
                   "ggthemes", "janitor", "magrittr", "mice", "naniar",
                   "party", "randomForest",  "rattle", "readr",
                   "reshape", "rpart", "skimr", "tidyverse", "tm",
                   "verification", "wordcloud"))
  • You will be asked Please select a CRAN mirror for use in this session and its okay to go with 0-Cloud [https]. The installation can take 5 or more minutes, depending on your Internet connection.

Test that this works for the normal user by starting up the Command Prompt, running R, and then, for example library(rattle).

We are now ready to install Rattle. There are a number of options available for installing Rattle on Windows:

  • Section 2.10 covers downloading a zip file, unzipping it and running the rattle executable.
  • Section 2.11 covers downloading a self-extracting exe file and running that to install the rattle executable.

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