1. Class - Thursday, Sept. 2
   1. Introduction
   2. Overview
      1. Main course resources
      2. Course format, grading, academic integrity
   3. Basic concepts in statistics
   4. A brief introduction to reproducible workflows in data science
   5. R and RStudio: Introduction
      1. R coding: Basics and Tutorial
2. Recitation - Friday, Sept. 3
   1. Introduction, Cont’d

Overview

Main course resources

We will use three main resources for the course:

• Brightspace
  • Quizzes and Homeworks will be posted here.
• XDASI 2021 Website
  • Syllabus (class notes, exercises) and Resources will be posted here.
  • Look here for weekly class notes, exercises, background reading, and homework announcements.
• XDASI 2021 Slack Workspace
  • We will use this for rapid communication among members of the class and the instructors.
  • Post questions, comments, helpful links, etc. here.
  • Share with the whole class or individual students or instructors.

Course format, grading, academic integrity

Basic concepts in statistics

1. What is the field of statistics about?
   • Methods to measure aspects of populations and quantify uncertainty
   • Estimation: infer an unknown quantity of a population based on samples
   • Hypothesis testing
   • Sampling error: accuracy / precision, random samples / bias
2. What kinds of questions are asked?
   • Exploratory analysis
   • Inference about a population based on a sample
   • Correlations between variables (correlation is not causation)
   • Prediction of unknown samples
3. Types of studies
   • Experimental vs. observational
4. Data types and variables
   • Categorical: nominal vs. ordinal
   • Numerical: discrete vs. continuous

A brief introduction to reproducible workflows in data science

• Reproducible Science

R and RStudio: Introduction

• R, RStudio Basics
  • Installing R/Rstudio
  • Interfacing with R
  • RStudio Session Management
  • See R Resources pages for links to additional learning resources
• R Markdown slides
  • See the R Markdowns page for cheatsheets, quick guides, and other resources

TAKE A BREAK!!!

R coding: Basics and Tutorial

• Class exercise - HTML - RMD
• Answer key - HTML - RMD
  • Note that the section on indexing matrices was reorganized a little bit to make the presentation clearer.

Today we just finished working on the exercises we started yesterday. The answer key is posted along with the original exercise under the Class section of this page.