Reduce The Pain By Using Good Tools (in R)

Data wrangling is an ugly open secret: it often takes 80% of your time on a project. Most of us don't like it, and don't like to admit how much time and suffering is involved. The good news is a lot of data wrangling can be automated more than we usually do. In R, many good tools already exist to make it faster and more reliable.

In this talk, we discuss R tools for joining and reshaping data sets. If time permits, we will also talk about analysis tools such as "by" and "plyr", which reduce the amount of wrangling needed before analysis.

Lastly, this talk demonstrates reproducible analysis: once the data is wrangled, you should have an R routine that can do it all over again at the push of a button. This way anyone (usually you) can check it given the original data files.

Our Instructor

John Tillinghast is a local statistician who has worked in academics, industry, and government. He is currently teaching at American University.

Agenda

6:30 p.m. - Food and drinks

7:00 - Introductions and other fun

7:20 - Talk begins

8:30 or 9:00 - Data drinks down the street