All Reed freshman are required to take Humanities 110.

Only prereq was intro stats. No serious programming experience necessary.

18 students, mostly juniors and seniors.

• Real data i.e. messy & needing cleaning, from potentially disparate sources
• Bottom-up: Let questions/data motivate the statistical methodology, rather than vice-versa
• Discussions in class
• Lean on the statistical software language R heavily

• Key: Forget base R
• How? The Hadleyverse of packages by Hadley Wickham.
• In particular
  • dplyr package for data wrangling/manipulation
  • ggplot2 package for data visualization

A statistical graphic consists of a mapping of data variables to aesthetic attributes of geometric objects that we can observe.

Minard's map of Napoleon's Russian campaign of 1812:

• Sample of 10% of San Francisco OkCupid users in June 2012 (\(n=5995\))
• 40.2% of the sample was female
  
• Use logistic regression to predict gender

All 222,540 songs played on the Reed pool hall jukebox from 2003-2009 c/o Noah Pepper '09

quandl.com is a great source for economic data

"A web application framework for R. Turn your analyses into interactive web applications. No HTML, CSS, or JavaScript knowledge required."

• Baby Name Popularity in US
• Portland Crime
• Insect Abundance

• I hear this a lot:
  • Me: Hi, I'm Albert. I'm a statistician.
  • Them: Statistics? I hated that class!

• Data visualization is a backdoor way to get students interested in statistics.
• Prez from Season 4 of "The Wire":
• 

• A class focused on the data first, methods second, using only open-source tools
• Interactivity fostered by choice of classroom
• Data visualization is a gateway drug for statistics
• Rich Majerus wrote "Why should students at a small liberal arts college learn R?"

• Presentation slides: rpubs.com/rudeboybert/SevenTwentyNine_Miles
• Code and (non-private) data for class: github.com/rudeboybert/MATH241
• 17 out of 18 final projects data & code github.com/ReedCollegeMATH241

Features

• Data manipulation is performed using verbs
• The pipe %>% command, pronounced "THEN"

Info on all domestic flights leaving Houston (IAH) in 2011:

• flights: info on 227,496 flights
• planes: info on 2853 airplanes

What are the top 5 carriers using the oldest planes (averaged over all flights)?

The flights dataset:

The planes dataset:

The following sequence of verbs wrangle/manipulate the data:

left_join(flights, planes, by='plane') %>%
  select(carrier, plane, year) %>%
  mutate(age = 2011 - year) %>%
  group_by(carrier) %>%
  summarise(avg_age = mean(age)) %>%
  arrange(desc(avg_age)) %>%
  top_n(5)