An introductory course for first year Demography Graduate Students in the use of the Demography Lab. Covers basic Unix skills & computer hygiene, the Emacs editor, and the R and SAS statistical packages.
R is the common computing language of the Demography Department and as such, the mastery of R will be an important by-product of the course. The primary purpose of the course, however, is to develop general computing skills-- specifically: (1) design and implementation of algorithms and (2) good computing habits.
Weekly lab assignements will involve simulating interesting population processes and presenting the results in written and oral form. In addition to simulation, we will explore well known datasets such as historical Census, ACS, and the Current Population Survey. There is no final exam.
Since first year students are required to take Demography 110/210 simultaneously, this course complements that course in that it will provide the R background necessary for success.
The course meets once per week for a 1.0 hour lecture/demonstration. In addition there will be a 2.0 hour supervised lab weekly. Substantial work is expected outside of class.
| The text for this class is Introduction to R by W.N. Venabls and D.M. Smith. This is terse yet complete document. |
Below are some additional (free) documents. Most are slightly out of date, but since they are free it's hard to complain.
| Week 1: | Emacs and some other basic stuff | Assignment | demonstration.r |
| Week 2: | Finger Exercises Assignment | demonstration.r |
| Week 3: | R fundamentals, variable types, vector manipulation, a little bit of probability theory Assignment | demonstration.r |
| Week 4: | Arrays, lists, dataframes Assignment | demonstraton.r | (Optional): Emacs with R in subshell |
| Week 5: | Programming in R Assignment | demonstraton.r |
| Week 6: | lx and proportional hazard simulation demonstration and handout |
| Week 7: | Proportional hazard simulation extentions demonstration and handout |
| Week 8: | Graphics Assignment | demonstraton.r |
| Week 9: | Lattice Graphics Assignment 9 | demonstraton.r | A tour of trellis |
| Week 10: | Calculating Fertility Measures: ASFR and TFR Assignment |
| Week 11: | Analytical Graphics with Robert Chung |
| Week 12: | |
| Week 13: | Writing papers with LaTeX Assignment 10 | demonstration.tex | |
