Quantitative Methods in the
Social Sciences 2
Summer School on "R"
| Venue: | University of Bucharest, Romania |
| Date: | 1 - 7 September, 2010 |
| Organisers: | Adrian Duşa, University of Bucharest, Romania |
| Tutors: | Vladimir Batagelj, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia Adrian Duşa, University of Bucharest, Romania Melinda Mills, University of Groningen, The Netherlands |
Summary:
Among the many software packages that can be used for statistical analysis, some are well established in the social sciences (particularly SPSS, but also Stata on the commercial side). However, it can be safely stated that none have had the same explosive increase in popularity as the open-source R statistical software.
Many students and researchers feel intimidated by its steep learning curve. The aim of this summer school is to level down this curve and to demonstrate the easiness of using R for the social scientists.
For this purpose, the summer school will be divided in two main parts: the first half to demonstrate how to use R as a tool, and the second half to demonstrate some selected statistical analysis with R.
Topics
Days 1-3
Introductory part, getting participants familiar with the R environment:
- Interactive use of the R environment, basic types, objects, assignment, various operators, built-in functions, reserved names, vectors and recycling
- Indexing vectors, other structures (matrices, lists, arrays), reading/writing, saving, importing/exporting data to/from external files
- Control structures (branching, loops), creating and using functions, basic graphics
Days 4-6
Demonstration sessions (two per day) on the following applications with R (order to be confirmed):
- Advanced graphics (grid, lattice/trellis, producing graphs in formats requested by journals, maps and geodata)
- Regression (multiple linear, also logistic)
- Factor analysis
- Survival analysis
- Cluster analysis
- Modelling/fitting particular curves, smoothing