Welcome to STA 295

Lecture 1

Dr. Elijah Meyer

NC State University
ST 295 - Spring 2025

2025-01-07

Welcome

Goals for Day 1

Get organized

  • Get to know the professor
  • Get to know each other
  • Course overview
  • Register with GitHub

Who Am I?

 

Who Are You?

Please share with the class

  • Name
  • Major
  • Year (Freshman, Sophomore, etc.)
  • Why you are taking this course
  • Anything else

What is data science?

What is data science?

“Data science is a concept to unify statistics, data analysis, machine learning and their related methods in order to understand and analyze actual phenomena with data. It employs techniques and theories drawn from many fields within the context of mathematics, statistics, information science, and computer science.”

-Donoho, 2017

Examples of data science

  • Identification and prediction of disease
  • Targeted advertising
  • Supply chain optimization
  • Sports recruitment + strategist
  • The list goes on and on…..

Jobs

Jobs

Jobs

Data literacy

Data Literacy

Data Literacy

Our Course

Our Classroom

  • Community
  • Communication
  • Respect

Course objectives

  • Learn to explore, visualize, and analyze data in a reproducible and shareable manner

  • Gain experience in data wrangling, exploratory data analysis, predictive modeling, and data visualization

  • Work on problems and case studies inspired by and based on real-world questions and data

  • Learn to effectively communicate results through written assignments and final project presentation

Some of what you will learn

– Fundamentals of R

– Data visualization

– Version control with GitHub

– Reproducible reports with Quarto

– Regression

R - figures

R - figures

{fig.align = “center”}

R

Note

This is a new language

Workflow & Website

st295 (Tour)

Before Class

  • Watch lecture content videos

  • Complete prepare readings

During Class

  • Warm up question

  • Mix of lecture and interaction

Workflow & Website

Other resources

  • You will use GitHub to download (clone) your assessments in this course. We will practice how to do this many times together as a class.

  • We will use Gradescope to turn in assessments

  • We will use Moodle for any class announcements, our Gradebook, and have a weekly discussion forum where we can ask questions + have a conversation about technology, content, etc.

Please bring your laptops if able

Activities and assessments

  • Homework: (Mostly) Individual assignments combining conceptual and computational skills.

  • Exams: Two exams (mix of take-home + in-class)

  • Final Project: Team project presented at end of semester

  • Quizzes: (Mostly) weekly quizzes over the in-class activities

  • Statistics Experience: Engage with statistics outside of the classroom and reflect on your experience (posted mid-semester)

Technology

Create a GitHub account (Why?)

GitHub, Inc., is an Internet hosting service for software development and version control.

– remote collaboration

– project management

– keep track of changes to code / documents

Create a GitHub account (Why?)

GitHub, Inc., is an Internet hosting service for software development and version control.

Create a GitHub account

Go to https://github.com/, and create an account (unless you already have one).

Some tips from Happy Git with R.

– Incorporate your actual name!

– Reuse your username from other contexts if you can, e. g., Twitter or Slack.

– Pick a username you will be comfortable revealing to your future boss.

– Be as unique as possible in as few characters as possible. Shorter is better than longer.

– Avoid words with special meaning in programming (e.g. NA).

GitHub information

Google Sheet

Joining the class org

Later today, you will receive an invite!

Joining the class org

R-Studio

– Go to https://rstudio.stat.ncsu.edu

– Login!

Getting to know you survey

For Thursday

– We’ll start talking about the computing toolkit

– Prepare for Thursday

  > Look at the prepare material on the website 
  > Have accepted the GitHub organization invite

– Complete Getting to Know You Survey (by Friday)

Please bring laptop to class if able for next time!

🔗 class website