Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
And
Course Materials:
Each student has their own preferred learning style. With this in mind we provide several
ways to study the material. These are not required, and you can use other media if you
prefer. All of the options below are free.
Textbook:
Peter Dalgaard, Introductory Statistics with R, 2nd Edition, ISBN: 978-0-387-79053-4
This book has been uploaded to MiU in PDF format.
Online courses:
EdX: Explore Statistics with R
Coursera: Statistics 1
Short videos:
Introduction to R
Basic statistics
All programming in this class will be done in R. R is a free software environment for
statistical computing and graphics. This description comes from www.r-project.org,
where you can download R.
Course Description:
Course Structure:
There will be three projects in this class. For each project we will randomly match you
with a group of your classmates (note that this random matching takes place for every
project, your group will likely change between projects).
For each of these projects, your group will seek to answer a question using data analysis
performed in R. This may require that you acquire and clean data. Your group will
communicate your conclusions, with statistical support, via a medium of your choice.
We intentionally leave the requirements of the project somewhat vague so that you and
your group can decide how you would like to proceed.
Classroom Dynamic:
In a given class you will work with your group. You may choose the structure of your
group and how you want to organize your group. You can opt to choose a project leader
who then assigns various tasks. You can opt to proceed via a majority rules decision
structure. During a given class your group will identify areas that need attention. These
could be concepts that need to be mastered, data that must be collected or cleaned,
analysis that must be done, or writing that must be done. It is up to your group to then
decide how to address these things, and then to do it.
We will be present to advice you, and to provide feedback throughout, but we will not
show you how to accomplish a given task.
In order to enforce concepts, readings will be assigned to have discussions about them to
create the connection between the analytics and the business needs. These reading will
be in topics such as Social Networking Analysis (SNA), Big Data, Unstructured
Databases, etc.
Grading:
Your grade in this class is based entirely on the three projects. Each project will be
weighted equally. After a project is submitted, we will assign a grade to the project,
which we denote as . If there are people in your group, then the group will receive
points. The group will decide how to allocate these points among the group members.
The number of points the group allocates to you is your grade for the project.
Attendance:
Attendance is not used as part of the grading process of this class. However, students
who attend regularly will find it much easier to excel. As such, we strongly encourage
you to attend class. Please, as a courtesy to us and your fellow students, be punctual.