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ECN webinar: First steps in exploring data with R

Location
Online meeting
Dates
Contact person
ECN Webinar Cluster
E-Mail address
@email
Working groups
Meeting Category

The PAGES Early-Career Network (ECN) Webinar cluster will conduct the webinar "First steps in exploring data with R" on 27 May 2021 at 08:00 and 16:00 UTC.

The workshop will last for roughly 1.5 hours.

Description

Martin Schobben will help you get started with exploring your data in R in this interactive session.

R is an incredible flexible tool for data analyses and ensures reproducible science. However, the syntax of R, and the overwhelming body of documentation, can also be a major hurdle before implementing R as the standard tool for your day-to-day work.

The potential applications of R are very broad – an introductory class can thus also cover about anything. Hence, Martin has tailored this workshop to some of the specific needs of an Earth scientist dealing with stratigraphic observations, which include e.g. species count data or elemental sediment datasets. These datasets, that consist of values associated with one or more variables and an observation (depth, age, …) are very common in Earth sciences.

Martin will show how to start your data exploration in a reproducible workflow. This includes the journey from managing, ingesting (from csv files, URL, …) and tidying your data to introducing some basic transformations (so-called "data wrangling"), visualization and modeling. These routine aspects of data analysis cover about 80% of the skills required for a data science project, while the other 20% remains the domain of the specialist – which would be you.

Martin will divide the workshop in several sections, so that he can show you how to use the introduced functions within a live R session, while you can practice what you have learned by typing along. Learning R is mainly achieved by doing it yourself. By introducing you to some of his preferred data science tools, he hopes to make these initial steps of data exploration as enjoyable as possible. 

The talk will be followed by a Q&A session. Both the talk and Q&A session will be recorded and available afterwards on the ECN's YouTube channel.

How to join

Zoom link: https://zoom.us/j/99968112321

No registration required.

Requirements

Martin will not be dealing with the basics of R, so as a start, please familiarize yourself with chapter 1 of Peter Dalgaard’s Introductory statistics with R (see below). Note, that he will not be using the base plot function for graphic displays of data and the base functions for data selecting and transforming, as previewed in this chapter. But it is good to familiarize yourself with the basic functionality and structure of R.

If you want to write along with his suggestions, it is also advisable to have an up-to-date system, R version, and have RStudioTM installed. Installation and basic functionality is covered in chapter 1 of Hadley Wickham and Garrett Grolemund’s R for data science (see below). If you have no institutional access to Peter Dalgaard’s Introductory statistics with R, then this book also covers a cursory overview of basic R functionality.

A large fraction of the functions that Martin will highlight are part of the tidyverse universe. So, please have tidyverse installed. Insert the following command: install.packages("tidyverse") after the prompt (>) in your console.

References

For further information, see:

- Wickham, H. & Grolemund, G. R for data science: import, tidy, transform, visualize, and model data. (O’Reilly Media, Inc., 2016)
- Dalgaard, P. Introductory Statistics with R. 357 (2008). https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-0-387-79054-1

Further information

Find out more about the ECN Webinar cluster here.