Final Winter R Club Meeting

Tomorrow will be the last meeting of the term.

Remember that all those enrolled for credit will need to write up a final “What I Learned in R Club” statement.

This will also be a good opportunity for deciding on the direction we take next term. I have some ideas I’d like to propose and discuss. They all revolve around the basic idea that there is a high demand for instruction in some basic tasks that are easy in R and hard (or worse) otherwise.

How can we make R Club the best resource it can be? I think we can start by identifying core skills that people aren’t learning other places, and that are doable easily and efficiently in R; and by identifying barriers to using R.

Here’s a list I’ve been compiling to get us started:

  • R Syntax, or “Wtf is the dollar sign for?”
  • Programming basics
  • Cleaning, Joining, Reshaping
    • e.g., dwell time ratings with epochs
  • Overcoming the spreadsheet
    • Qualtrics data checking – how to solve mis-coding
    • Finding mistakes in factors etc (using dplyr)
  • Writing reproducible analyses
  • GGlorious Ploting
    • EDA and visual data checking
  • Document Rendering (pdf, html, docx on Windows, OS X, Linux)
  • Tables (correlation matrices with stat tests)

Fun methods:

  • MLM
  • Topic modeling
  • Social network analysis
  • Big data techniques (e.g., scraping with Rvest)
  • CFA

Some good coursework resources:

  • http://stat545-ubc.github.io/
  • http://simplystatistics.org/2016/02/12/not-so-standard-deviations-episode-9-spreadsheet-drama/

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