Welcome to STA 199
Lecture 1
Duke University
STA 199 - Fall 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?
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.”
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
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
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
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!