Course Title: Computing with R (Module 1)

Dates: 22 June 2020 – 03 July 2020

Tuition fees for the entire course:
Professionals: 2,600 CHF
External students: 1,900 CHF
UNIGE students: 1,000 CHF (limited number of places)
Early bird fee: no
Course description:
The statistical software R has come into prominence due to its flexibility as an efficient
language that builds a bridge between software development and data analysis. For example,
one strength of R is the facility to develop and quickly adapt to the different needs coming
from the data management and analysis community while at the same time making use of
other languages in order to deliver computationally efficient solutions.

Week 1: Introduction to Data Computing with R

The course objectives and content include:
- Become proficient with tools and workflow (R programming language, RStudio
development environment, RMarkdown, Git/GitHub source control, Shiny)
- Introduction to data wrangling using tidyverse tools
- Achieve proficiency with layered graphs & data visualization

Week 2: R Programming for Data Science

The course objectives and content include:
- Advanced data visualization using ggplot2
- Tidy data and iteration using tidyverse: function definition, vectorized operations
(e.g., dplyr::do and apply family), iteration (e.g., mosaic::do), non-standard data
intake (e.g., web scraping & other sources)
- Statistical modeling for exploration, inference, and prediction
- Supervised learning: classification and regression modeling (e.g., decision trees,
random forests, naive Bayes, neural networks), regularization, ensemble methods,
model evaluation.
- Unsupervised learning: clustering, dimension reduction
- Text data in R (regular expressions, ingesting text, analyzing textual data)
- Interactive graphics and app development (e.g., Shiny, Plot.ly, ggvis)
- R for “big data” and complementary tools (e.g., python, C++)

The course resources are open access and include:

- Data Computing: An Introduction to Wrangling and Visualisation with R (2nd edition)
by Kaplan & Beckman (free ebook: https://dtkaplan.github.io/DataComputingEbook/)
 - An Introduction to Statistical Programming Methods with R by Beckman, Guerrier,
Lee, & Molinari (free ebook: https://smac-group.github.io/ds/)
- Advanced R by Wickham (free ebook: http://adv-r.had.co.nz/)
- R for Data Science by Grolemund & Wickham (free ebook: https://r4ds.had.co.nz)
- Introduction to Statistical Learning by James, Witten, Hastie, & Tibshirani (free PDF:
http://wwwbcf.usc.edu/~gareth/ISL/)
- Text Mining in R by Silge & Robinson (free ebook: https://www.tidytextmining.com/)

Course credits: equivalence of 6 ECTS credits (or 3 ECTS per week), based on a
personal/group project
Target Audience: students with interests in analytics methods and numerical sciences.
Prerequisites: Enthusiastic and motivated researchers in both academic and industry who
want to gain more of an understanding of RCT design and eventually progress to designing
their own studies. The R Programming for Data Science workshop is a continuation of
Introduction to Data Computing with R workshop. While completion of the preceding week–
Introduction to Data Computing with R–is strongly recommended, students with sufficient
prior experience with R programming and statistical modeling can enroll in the second
week–R Programming for Data Science–workshop directly.
Faculty & Staff:
Program Directors:
- Prof. Maria-Pia Victoria-Feser, GSEM, University of Geneva
- Prof. Stephane Guerrier, GSEM, University of Geneva
Instructors:

Prof. Matthew Beckman: Matthew Beckman is currently Assistant Research Professor at the
Department of Statistics, Penn State University, as well as the Director of Undergraduate
Studies. He earned a PhD in Statistics Education from the University of Minnesota where he
previously earned his MS in Statistics. Prior to academia, he worked as a Senior Statistician &
Senior Biostatistician in the medical device industry for 8 years. His current research
interests include statistics education, educational assessment, and industrial statistics.

Prof. Stephane Guerrier: GSEM, University of Geneva

Dr Samuel Orso: GSEM, University of Geneva