LA East R Users: Unit testing and Exponential-Family Random Graph Models

Talk 1:
Speaker: John Peach
Title: It’s not that we don’t test our code, it’s that we don’t store
our tests

Abstract:
Software testing is important and we all do it. However, it is often not done in a principled way. It is standard practice in the software development community but is less common in analytics. testthat is a
testing framework for R that is similar to other unit testing systems that you may know. It seamlessly integrates into the package development workflow so that you can test early and often.

testthat decreases code development and maintenance frustration. Unit testing will help you develop better code structure by making your code easier to test. Thus, lazy development becomes better development. It allows you to quickly debug issues by isolating the source of a bug faster so that you can get back to the ‘real’ coding. It also allows you to have confidence that your changes did not break existing code.

We will go over some basic unit testing concepts, how to set up testthat
and write tests.

Talk 2:
Speaker: George G. Vega Yon (@gvegayon)
Title: What drives social networks?: A gentle introduction to exponential random graph models (with a focus on small networks)

Abstract: Exponential-Family Random Graph Models (a.k.a. ERGMs) are a family of statistical models that were designed to describe networks as a product of the prevalence of local structures like transitive triads (the friend of my friend is my friend) and reciprocal ties. ERGMs are one of the main tools social scientists use to understand social networks in a variety of contexts (school, work, teams, politics, etc.), and in this talk, we will take a look at one aspect of it that, while simple looking, is highly computationally complex, this is, small networks.

Part of this talk will be presented at the International Conference of the "International Network for Social Network Analysis" (Sunbelt 2019).

Code of Conduct: https://github.com/laRusers/codeofconduct

Timeline:
6:30: Socializing
7:00-8:00: Talks
8:00: Socializing

Address:
Room 115/116
USC
2001 N. Soto St.
Los Angeles, CA 90032

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Ask us any questions by email: laerusers@gmail.com
Find our previous talks on GitHub: https://github.com/laeRusers/presentations
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Check out more events: https://laocr.org/