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Try R — A new online course, for free

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Re: Try R — A new online course, for free

#111

Post by brianto2010 »

crowding wrote: post #93
frozenport wrote: post #21

I do most of my stats work in Matlab, why should I use R?

I've used Matlab for about 15 years and R for about 3. Matlab burned me pretty badly during my graduate career; two weeks after deciding to learn R, I'd recreated a data analysis/modeling/graphing problem I'd previously done in MATLAB, using about one third the amount of code in R. Perhaps R and its available libraries better suit the way I think about problems, but most people in my department agree I code circles a…

> R is currently the lingua franca for academic statisticians. New methods papers, textbooks, and toolkits are much more likely to ship with R libraries and implementations then Matlab or anything else.

Is this the same in industry? I've heard a professor say that SAS is more widely used.

Re: Try R — A new online course, for free

#112

Post by frankc »

ej3 wrote: post #85
temp453463343 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't. I've used both extensively (though not for statistics). R's syntax is a little more C-like and consistent than MATLAB's - however the biggest difference is documentation. R's, like most open source documentation, is rather terse and often very unsatisfactory. This gets especially apparent once you get into 3rd party libraries and use things like Bioconductor. You’ll have no idea how things are designed to be u…

I came here to say this as well - Don't. This is of course my own opinion, and I can only promise this comment will get progressively more subjective the farther you read. R's documentation is terse and unorganized. Anyone who says different is obviously someone with more experience with the language (which is not how it should be). When people complain about the documentation it's because they're trying to learn, an…

Base graphics is poweful but definitely full of crazy. However, ggplot2 is well designed as one integrated system and makes total sense. The model is a bit more complicated to understand than literally specifying what goes where as you do in most graphics apis, but the documentation is very good and there are lots of people who know it well and respond helpfully on mailing lists and stackoverflow.

Re: Try R — A new online course, for free

#113

Post by just_saying »

scrumper wrote: post #10
just_saying wrote: post #6

I shouldn't have to enable JavaScript to try R.

Umm... You could download an R environment, but that's hardly a smaller footprint than enabling JS. How else would you do it?

Well, HTTP GET and POST still work. No one seems to mind sending and receiving data that way when they're wrapped in AJAX calls.

Re: Try R — A new online course, for free

#114

Post by merlinsbrain »

MichaelJW wrote: post #109
merlinsbrain wrote: post #105

I was very interested in the course syllabus for 'Statistics One' by Prof. Andrew Conway. I missed the course on Coursera and now I'm unable to view the course archive. Does anyone know where I can find the lectures? (Yes, I've googled some.)

Take a look here: http://www.universalsubtitles.org/en/teams/coursera/?project... Credit: http://www.aiqus.com/questions/38783/download-upcoming-cours... Edit: Is this like posting a pirate link?

Thanks a ton!

And no I don't think so, as they claim "Amara gives individuals, communities, and larger organizations the power to overcome accessibility and language barriers for online video." You just helped me watch a course that was posted for free online. Isn't that the point of this? :)

Re: Try R — A new online course, for free

#115

Post by tomku »

merlinsbrain wrote: post #105

I was very interested in the course syllabus for 'Statistics One' by Prof. Andrew Conway. I missed the course on Coursera and now I'm unable to view the course archive. Does anyone know where I can find the lectures? (Yes, I've googled some.)

I took that course when it was running on Coursera, and I honestly can't recommend it (in its current state, at least) to anyone looking to learn basic statistics.

It covered a lot of material, but the quality and order of coverage was very inconsistent. The first couple weeks were fine, but it felt really odd to jump from correlations and scatterplots into regression, then come back to t-tests and AOV afterwards. There were also some errors in the R code on the slides, which led to a lot of confusion on the discussion forums during the class. As a student, it didn't feel like the class's pedagogical approach was very good, and I'm now finding myself using other resources to fill in the gaps.

If you'd like to hear more about those other resources I'd gladly post a list, but they're mostly Python-centric. One that I can whole-heartedly recommend even if you stick with Prof. Conway's class is the set of lectures from Roger Peng's "Computing for Data Analysis" class on Coursera. The course itself isn't available at the moment, but the videos are on his Youtube channel[1]. It teaches R from a programming perspective, and you'll find the content invaluable once you start writing R code that's more complex than a couple stats functions and a plot.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/user/rdpeng/videos?flow=grid&vie...

Re: Try R — A new online course, for free

#116

Post by taeric »

frankc wrote: post #110
taeric wrote: post #23

So, I've started using R for some stuff I'm doing at work. I have to say that I'm basically treating it as a non visual spreadsheet. Seems everything I've used it for so far, I could have done with excel. Am I doing it wrong?

Not doing it wrong, but only using a subset of R. For instance, R has powerful data manipulation ability that can get your data to use the subset of R that does what Excel does. R also has a huge library of packages that go way beyond what Excel can do, especially for statistics. Sure, you can do an ols regression in Excel, but you can you do a complicated machine learning model?

I should have been clearer. I've never been "good" at using Excel. So far, I've really only done things that I would think you could do in Excel. Might be a touch overkill, but I'm not sure. I am curious which data manipulation items you are referring to. Any good pointers?

I am going through the Machine Learning for Hackers book, though. So far it has been interesting. I guess I never realized that machine learning is essentially statistics. (Or am I looking at that incorrectly, too?)

Re: Try R — A new online course, for free

#117

Post by just_saying »

ramblerman wrote: post #83
just_saying wrote: post #6

I shouldn't have to enable JavaScript to try R.

"I want to partake in all the goodness the modern internet has to offer... but only on my terms!" There was a time when NoJS plugins and the likes were valid (neccessary). These days you're crippling your browser experience more and more. Which is entirely your perogative of course, but then don't make sweeping complainst about things not working. What did you really expect? Them to run your R code server side? a) Th…

I want to be able to say that I assuredly KNOW what my computer is doing at all times.

There was a time when JavaScript wasn't minified/obfuscated, and the libraries weren't so huge as to require expert knowledge of exactly what was happening under the hood.

I think your claim, that disabling JavaScript is merely invalid snobbery, is as silly as you think my idea of "crippling my experience (and by corollary everyone else's)" is.

You make the assumption that I want the world to bend to my will, but I don't. All I'm pointing out is that the rich experience doesn't degrade gracefully, to a no-script experience. It doesn't even tell you that you need JS enabled, you should just know that already.

I don't mind page refreshes, and I'd put forward that the type of person browsing without scripts enabled would already notice that every other page behaves that way, when scripts are turned off.

If you're going to take the time to emulate the behavior of a statistics application in JavaScript, what's it take to also ensure that users get a similar experience when not enabling scripts? If a user is STUCK with an inferior browser/experience, it's not always their fault. The point I'd like make is that the answer is generally "tough. you're SOL. go get a better computer, and figure it out. try again, from somewhere else."

You make the assumption that I'm being a snob, but as part of testing out any new website, I'll explore how it reacts with no styles, no images and no scripts. You tell me I want an inferior solution, and then call me the snob? How does that work? We'll probably never see eye-to-eye on these tidbits of taste-making, but maybe I'd accept your criticism a little more willingly if you called me pedantic, a paranoiac, or a browser-Luddite. Either way, I'm not taking your contrary opinion personally, but my side of the coin deserves some representation on this site.

I know my opinions about flashy user experience go against the grain, and clash with the opinions of the JavaScript clique here, but I think this kind of criticism belongs in the conversation, even if it gets shouted down. Especially for bigger, well-established learning websites like oreilly.com.

Re: Try R — A new online course, for free

#118

Post by bulldog »

hkmurakami wrote: post #3

Thanks. I was sorely disappointed yesterday when I found out that Coursera classes follow a strict schedule (and that I couldn't look at the material right then) and that I wouldn't be able to try the Data Analysis with R course on their site. I'll definitely check this out :).

https://class.coursera.org/compdata-2012-001/class/index

Re: Try R — A new online course, for free

#119

Post by tanyaM »

hadley wrote: post #72
id_ris wrote: post #50

I've been using R extensively for the past 12 months and have achieved a high level of comfort with the language. Now I find myself at a wall because of my lack of math and statistics background. I've taken R as far as I can, or put more properly, R has taken me as far as I can go without learning more math. With that said, I have little reason to use R right now except for it's excellent plotting ability with ggplot…

Would love to hear what you find most painful about data munging/wrangling and unit testing. It's something that I've been trying to improve in R (e.g. http://vita.had.co.nz/papers/tidy-data.html and http://journal.r-project.org/archive/2011-1/RJournal_2011-1_... )

Do you think the love it/hate it dichotomy over R for data 'munging' stems from different ways of thinking about data. I'm slowly getting comfortable in R since returning to work in a sort of freelance arrangement that makes me highly motivated to use free or affordable tools. I started out, however, in clinical epidemiology data analysis using MS Access and SAS. I still think of data in terms of rectangular data sets, RDBMS and sql. I have a hard time with vector and matrix related terminology. I think I'm going to end up using reshape2 and data.table a lot since sqldf is noticeably slower even with my small data sets (compared with web analytics, finance, etc). The problem with sqldf and variable names containing a dot is a real drag as I try to adopt good coding style. I am missing the clarity and familiarity of sql statements, though, as I try to find my new workflow in R. I hope a more unified approach to data munging emerges soon. BTW, I totally espouse the reproducible research (RR) method of documenting study design, analysis, interpretation... I am loving knitr and latex for RR so I can no longer imagine using different tools for data munging and analysis.

Re: Try R — A new online course, for free

#120

Post by merlinsbrain »

tomku wrote: post #115
merlinsbrain wrote: post #105

I was very interested in the course syllabus for 'Statistics One' by Prof. Andrew Conway. I missed the course on Coursera and now I'm unable to view the course archive. Does anyone know where I can find the lectures? (Yes, I've googled some.)

I took that course when it was running on Coursera, and I honestly can't recommend it (in its current state, at least) to anyone looking to learn basic statistics. It covered a lot of material, but the quality and order of coverage was very inconsistent. The first couple weeks were fine, but it felt really odd to jump from correlations and scatterplots into regression, then come back to t-tests and AOV afterwards. Th…

Hi, thanks a ton for the detailed response. Luckily I don't really need a Stats 101, so I don't think I'll mind him jumping around. If, of course, it does get a bother I know which course is right for me. Till then I'm also doing a bit of Thrun's Udacity Stats course on the side.

I would actually appreciate a list of resources in Python, that's what I like using most! I have downloaded a copy of "Think Stats", but haven't gone through it yet.

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