Welcome to STA 371H! Today we will review the syllabus and course structure, and get our first introduciton to R and RStudio. We won’t cover everything on the syllabus in detail, so please make sure you read it over this week. It’s posted to Canvas and linked under the About and Resources sections of this webpage.

These “Week X” posts will outline my plans for the current week, provide materials we use in class, and assign material to get you ready for next week. I will also use them to assign exercises to hand in.

Materials used in class this week

Slides

R code

Readings, videos, and activities to do for next week

Before next Monday::

Read the following:

• Probability and conditional probability (DSGI)
• How Good Are FiveThirtyEight Forecasts?

Before next Wednesday::

Read the following:

• Simpson’s paradox and the rule of total probability (DSGI)

Complete the following walkthroughs to get R/RStudio installed on your machine:

• Installing R and RStudio: This should get you up and running with R and RStudio.
  • Installing packages in RStudio: R is more than a single software program; it has the ability to access a central repository of “packages” that add new functionality to R. As of this writing there are over 10,000 R packages in this repository! We will use the mosaic package throughout the semester, so go ahead and install that package following this tutorial.
  • Getting familiar with R: A quick demo to help get you started in R.
• Download the R script above that I used in class and run it yourself. It might help to have the slides open as you work through the code.

Exercises and other things due next week

• Weds (1/27): Knowledge check (covering the syllabus). I will post a Canvas announcement when this is available.