Three-Toed Sloth

Introduction to Statistical Computing

At the intersection of Enigmas of Chance and Corrupting the Young.

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Lectures:
1. Introduction to the class, basic data types, basic data structures
2. More Data Structures: Matrices, Lists, Data Frames, Structures of Structures
3. Flow Control, Looping, Vectorization
4. Writing and Calling Functions
5. Writing Multiple Functions
6. Top-Down design
7. The Scope of Names
8. Debugging
9. Testing
10. Functions as Arguments
11. Functions as Return Values
12. Exam briefing
13. Split, Apply, Combine: Using Base R
14. Split, Apply, Combine: Using plyr
15. Abstraction and Refactoring
16. Simulation I: Random Variable Generation
17. Exam debriefing
18. Simulation II: Monte Carlo and Markov Chains
19. Simulation III: Mixing and Markov Chain Monte Carlo
20. Basic Character Manipulation
21. Regular Expressions I
22. Regular Expressions II
23. Importing Data from Webpages I
24. Importing Data from Webpages II
25. Databases I
26. Databases II

Homework:
1. Rainfall and Data Structures
2. Tweaking Resource-Allocation-by-Tweaking
3. Improving Estimation by Nonlinear Least Squares
4. Standard Errors of the Cat Heart
5. Rancorous Testing
6. Outlier-Robust Linear Regression
7. 'Tis the Season to Be Unemployed
8. Sampling Accidents
9. Get (the 400) Rich(est list) Quick
10. Baseball Salaries

Labs:
1. Basic Probability and Basic Data Structures
2. Flow Control and the Urban Economy
3. Of Big- and Small- Hearted Cats
4. Further Errors of the Cat Heart
5. Testing Our Way to Outliers
6. Likelihood
7. Split-Apply-Combine
8. Changing My Shape, I Feel Like an Accident
9. Regular Expressions I

Exams:
1. Midterm
2. Final Project Descriptions

My Work Here Is Done

Self-Evaluation and Lessons Learned