Welcome to STA 199

Lecture 1

Dr. Elijah Meyer

Duke University
STA 199 - Summer 2023

2023-08-29

Welcome

Goals for Day 1

Get organized

Get to know the professor
Get to know each other
Course overview
Register with GitHub & Slack

Who Am I?

Who Are You?

Please share with your neighbors:

Major
Year
Why you are taking this course
Anything else

What is data science?

“Data science is a concept to unify statistics, data analysis, machine learning and their related methods in order to understand and analyze actual phenomena with data. It employs techniques and theories drawn from many fields within the context of mathematics, statistics, information science, and computer science.”

-Donoho, 2017

Examples of data science

Identification and prediction of disease
Targeted advertising
Supply chain optimization
Sports recruitment + strategist
The list goes on and on…..

Jobs

Jobs

Jobs

Data literacy

Data Literacy

Our Course

Our Classroom

Community
Communication
Respect

Course objectives

Learn to explore, visualize, and analyze data in a reproducible and shareable manner
Gain experience in data wrangling, exploratory data analysis, predictive modeling, and data visualization
Work on problems and case studies inspired by and based on real-world questions and data
Learn to effectively communicate results through written assignments and final project presentation

Some of what you will learn

– Fundamentals of R

– Data visualization

– Web scraping

– Version control with GitHub

– Reproducible reports with Quarto

– Regression

– Statistical inference

R - figures

Example R Figures

{fig.align = “center”}

R

Note

This is a new language

Workflow & Website

sta199-f23-1.github.io/

Before Class

Watch lecture content videos

During Class

Warm up question
Mix of lecture and interaction

Please bring your laptops if able

Activities and assessments

Homework: Individual assignments combining conceptual and computational skills.
Labs: Individual or team assignments focusing on computational skills.
Exams: Two take-home exams.
Final Project: Team project presented during the final exam period.
Application Exercises: Exercises worked on during the live lecture session.
Statistics Experience: Engage with statistics outside of the classroom and reflect on your experience.

Lab

Focus on computing using R tidyverse syntax
Apply concepts from lecture to case study scenarios
Work on labs individually or in teams of 3 - 4

Technology

Create a GitHub account (Why?)

GitHub, Inc., is an Internet hosting service for software development and version control.

– remote collaboration

– project management

– keep track of changes to code / documents

Create a GitHub account (Why?)

GitHub, Inc., is an Internet hosting service for software development and version control.

Create a GitHub account

Please do this before the Getting to know you survey

Go to https://github.com/, and create an account (unless you already have one).

Some tips from Happy Git with R.

– Incorporate your actual name!

– Reuse your username from other contexts if you can, e. g., Twitter or Slack.

– Pick a username you will be comfortable revealing to your future boss.

– Be as unique as possible in as few characters as possible. Shorter is better than longer.

– Avoid words with special meaning in programming (e.g. NA).

GitHub account

Invite Example

GitHub

Slack

https://slack.com/get-started#/createnew

R-Studio

– Reserve a STA198-1991 RStudio container

– Go to https://cmgr.oit.duke.edu/containers

– Click Reserve Container for the STA198-199 container

R-Studio Tour (if time)

Getting to know you survey

For Thursday

– We’ll start talking about the computing toolkit

– Prepare for Thursday

– Complete Getting to Know You Survey (by Wednesday)

Please bring laptop to class if able for next time!