Software Tools

It is said that 80% of data analysis is spent on the process of cleaning and preparing the data for exploration, visualization, and analysis. This R workshop will introduce the dplyr and tidyr packages to make data wrangling and manipulation easier. Participants will learn how to use these packages to subset and reshape data sets, do calculations across groups of data, clean data, and other useful tasks.

This workshop will start by introducing you to navigating your computer’s file system and basic Bash commands to remove the fear of working with the command line and to give you the confidence to use it to increase your productivity. And then working with Git, a powerful tool for keeping track of changes you make to the files in a project.

Machine learning often evokes images of Skynet, self-driving cars, and computerized homes. However, these ideas are less science fiction as they are tangible phenomena that are predicated on description, classification, prediction, and pattern recognition in data. During this two part workshop, we will discuss basic features of supervised machine learning algorithms including k-nearest neighbor, linear regression, decision tree, random forest, boosting, and ensembling using the tidymodels framework. To social scientists, such methods might be critical for investigating evolutionary relationships, global health patterns, voter turnout in local elections, or individual psychological diagnoses.

This workshop will start by introducing you to navigating your computer’s file system and basic Bash commands to remove the fear of working with the command line and to give you the confidence to use it to increase your productivity. And then working with Git, a powerful tool for keeping track of changes you make to the files in a project.