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Introduction to Modern Statistics

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11–20 of 138 posts

Re: Introduction to Modern Statistics

#11
post #9

They should remove "modern" from the title, because who the hell uses the "R programming language" these days anymore?

Everyone in my branch of Toxicology? Tons of people in biological sciences. Just because you have bias against the tool and don't run in the same circles doesn't mean that R isn't used and love by a subset of devs.

Re: Introduction to Modern Statistics

#14
post #9

They should remove "modern" from the title, because who the hell uses the "R programming language" these days anymore?

A lot of people... in fact a huge portion of statisticians, epidemiologists, econometrics, use it as their primary language.

I do genetic epidemiology (which is considerably more compute intensive than regular epidemiology), and R is still the most common language, with the most libraries and packages being used for it, compared to python for example.

I think maybe you should consider being less forthcoming with your opinions on topics which you are not well informed on.

Re: Introduction to Modern Statistics

#17
post #4

What is a good book on statistics that one can use for self-learning?

A couple of more introductory books that come at it from the point of view of "someone who can code" are: - https://greenteapress.com/wp/think-stats-2e/ (and the similar Think Bayes if you enjoy this one) - https://nostarch.com/learnbayes

Can second Statistical Rethinking though if you have the basics of stats and want to learn it again from a very different, more causal/bayesian point of view.

Re: Introduction to Modern Statistics

#18
post #9

They should remove "modern" from the title, because who the hell uses the "R programming language" these days anymore?

Before I knew command line, I tried to install python and spent the next 3 days resolving an installation issue with 'wheel'.

By contrast, from first downloading R to running my first R script took about 1 hour (the most difficult part was opening the 'script' pane in RStudio IDE, which doesn't open by default on new installations, for some reason).

There's huge demand out there for statistical software that's accessible to people whose primary pursuit is not programming/cs, but genetics, bioinformatics, economics, ecology and other disciplines that necessitate tooling much more powerful than excel, but with barriers to entry not much greater than excel. R is a fairly amazing fit for those folks.

Re: Introduction to Modern Statistics

#19
Anyone looking to apply and compare frequentist and bayesian methods within a unified GUI (which is essentially an elegant wrapper to R and selected/custom statistical packages), should check out JASP developed by the University of Amsterdam [0]. It's free to use, and the graphs + captions generated during each step are publication quality right out of the box.

Using it truly feels like a 'fresh way' to do statistics. Its main website provides ample use cases, guides and tutorials, and I often return to the blog for the well documented deepdives into how traditional frequentist methods and their bayesian counterparts compare (the animated explainers are especially helpful, and I appreciate the devs reflecting on each release and future directions).

[0]: https://jasp-stats.org/

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