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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

#61

Post by smegglybones »

wallee wrote: post #58
seanlinehan wrote: post #7

This is great. I've nearly completed a class at UC Berkeley which was almost entirely in R and I can say with certainty that it is a marvelous language. It is powerful, concise, and has an incredibly robust community. I've experimented with many programming languages, but I have not used one which allows you to experiment as rapidly as R. I'm currently going through the Codeschool lessons to see if there is anything…

Revolution R is also really nice to develop in. I believe that you can get an academic version for free.

Revolution R is just Enterprise R. RStudio is on Github, folks. Real talk.

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

#62

Post by gwern »

kayge wrote: post #22
seanlinehan wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a very, very good point. Though, many of the functions that R provides just won't make any sense at all if you don't have an intuition for the statistics behind it. I have found myself reading the papers published about specific functions in order to understand the results. Do you have any resources that you suggest for beginners in statistics looking to learn on their own?

You probably can't go wrong with the Introduction to Statistics class from Udacity http://www.udacity.com/overview/Course/st101/CourseRev/1

I thought http://oli.cmu.edu/courses/free-open/statistics-course-detai... was a great introduction, after completing it.

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

#63

Post by ikram »

seanlinehan wrote: post #17
Homunculiheaded wrote: post #15

For anyone interest in R without a background in statistics: I would highly recommend learning the two in parallel (if not statistics first). R is first and foremost a language for statistical computing. You really aren't going get much out of it without working on some interesting data/stats problems. Plus for most hacker types I think being able to play with the statistics you're learning about with R can be a grea…

This is a very, very good point. Though, many of the functions that R provides just won't make any sense at all if you don't have an intuition for the statistics behind it. I have found myself reading the papers published about specific functions in order to understand the results. Do you have any resources that you suggest for beginners in statistics looking to learn on their own?

Take a look at the free online course on Statistical Reasoning from CMU:

http://oli.cmu.edu/courses/free-open/statistical-reasoning-c...

It includes interactive exercises with an option to do them in R.

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

#65

Post by dan_yall »

iaw wrote: post #42
Homunculiheaded wrote: post #15

For anyone interest in R without a background in statistics: I would highly recommend learning the two in parallel (if not statistics first). R is first and foremost a language for statistical computing. You really aren't going get much out of it without working on some interesting data/stats problems. Plus for most hacker types I think being able to play with the statistics you're learning about with R can be a grea…

While it is predominantly a statistics language there is also a huge wealth of data manipulation capabilities in functions like plyr, aggregate, *apply, ave, subset, etc. Just in terms of organizing data sets, ignoring any statistical analysis, R is fantastic.

I've found Python + Pandas much better in this regard than R. Maybe it's just me, but for grouping, indexing, and manipulating tabular data, Python syntax just makes more sense.

That said, R is better for stats and matrix operations.

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

#66

Post by chernevik »

Homunculiheaded wrote: post #15

For anyone interest in R without a background in statistics: I would highly recommend learning the two in parallel (if not statistics first). R is first and foremost a language for statistical computing. You really aren't going get much out of it without working on some interesting data/stats problems. Plus for most hacker types I think being able to play with the statistics you're learning about with R can be a grea…

How about not-beginners looking to refresh / deepen their intuitions?

I've recently been working with the Python toolset in this space -- pandas, numpy, matplotlib -- and run smack dab into my rusty regression analysis. In particular I need to better understand the distribution assumptions underlying the error distributions and the variances around the coefficient and intercept values.

Any suggestions for some deeper study / refresher?

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

#68

Post by iaw »

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?

Nope, that's one way to look at it (especially if you're sticking with data frames).

The nice thing about that outlook is that you can essentially automate tasks you would normally perform on a spreadsheet.

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

#69

Post by wasd »

seanlinehan wrote: post #7

This is great. I've nearly completed a class at UC Berkeley which was almost entirely in R and I can say with certainty that it is a marvelous language. It is powerful, concise, and has an incredibly robust community. I've experimented with many programming languages, but I have not used one which allows you to experiment as rapidly as R. I'm currently going through the Codeschool lessons to see if there is anything…

Stat 133 is great. I took it with Spector and he was phenomenal.

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

#70

Post by hadley »

dan_yall wrote: post #65
iaw wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While it is predominantly a statistics language there is also a huge wealth of data manipulation capabilities in functions like plyr, aggregate, *apply, ave, subset, etc. Just in terms of organizing data sets, ignoring any statistical analysis, R is fantastic.

I've found Python + Pandas much better in this regard than R. Maybe it's just me, but for grouping, indexing, and manipulating tabular data, Python syntax just makes more sense. That said, R is better for stats and matrix operations.

Are you using Pandas? If so, your comment would be ironic because pandas borrows heavily from R ;)
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