Module 1: An Introduction and Motivation for R Programming

Jacob Jameson
Summer 2021

Welcome!

  • Why are we here?
  • What are we going to do?
  • A quick introduction to R

Teaching Members

  • Instructor: Jacob Jameson
  • Experience:
    • 2nd year MSCAPP student
    • Data Analyst at the Center for Health and the Social Sciences
    • Previous TA for the Booth course Data Analysis in R and Python
  • Research Interests: I am interested in studying the quantitative techniques that are used for medical decision-making at the individual and collective level.

You will also have several TAs who will be helping you along the way

Why learn coding?

Many public policy jobs and the Harris curriculum rely on programming

  • to quickly engage with policy data
  • to complete statistical analyses

Why R?

  • Great data manipulation and visualization suite
  • Strong statistical packages (e.g. program evaluation, machine learning)
  • Complete programming language with low barriers to entry
  • Open source and free

An Example

Quantifying the impact of a proposed federal partnership with the company Dollar General to serve as vaccination sites and comparing vaccine access with Dollar General to the current Federal Retail Pharmacy Partnership Program.

data

What will we cover?

Coding Camp:

  1. Motivation/Installation of R
  2. Installing Packages and Reading Data
  3. Basic Data Manipulation
  4. Markdown Files, Knitting, and Data Structures
  5. More on Data Manipulation and Analysis
  6. Data Cleaning and Debugging


This is just the beginning of your programming journey!

A Curated Tour

  • There is a lot of information out there

data

  • We will only cover some of it

  • If you think we are covering too much, also let us know

Textbooks and Resources

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Textbooks and Resources

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Textbooks and Resources