Statistical Learning About This Course This is an introductory-level course in supervised learning, with a focus on regression and classification methods. The syllabus includes: linear and polynomial regression, logistic regression and linear discriminant analysis; cross-validation and the bootstrap, model selection and regularization methods (ridge and lasso); nonlinear models, splines and generalized additive models; tree-based methods, random forests and boosting; support-vector machines. Some unsupervised learning methods are discussed: principal components and clustering (k-means and hierarchical). This is not a math-heavy class, so we try and describe the methods without heavy reliance on formulas and complex mathematics. We focus on what we consider to be the important elements of modern data analysis. The lectures cover all the material in An Introduction to Statistical Learning, with Applications in R by James, Witten, Hastie and Tibshirani (Springer, 2013). Course Staff Trevor Hastie Rob Tibshirani
Quick-R: Home Page MIT Beginner's guide to R: Introduction R is hot. Whether measured by more than 4,400 add-on packages, the 18,000+ members of LinkedIn's R group or the close to 80 R Meetup groups currently in existence, there can be little doubt that interest in the R statistics language, especially for data analysis, is soaring. Why R? It's free, open source, powerful and highly extensible. "You have a lot of prepackaged stuff that's already available, so you're standing on the shoulders of giants," Google's chief economist told The New York Times back in 2009. Because it's a programmable environment that uses command-line scripting, you can store a series of complex data-analysis steps in R. That also makes it easier for others to validate research results and check your work for errors -- an issue that cropped up in the news recently after an Excel coding error was among several flaws found in an influential economics analysis report known as Reinhart/Rogoff. Sure, you can easily examine complex formulas on a spreadsheet. Why not R?
Code School - Try R was mache ich hier? Why R is Hard to Learn by Bob Muenchen R has a reputation of being hard to learn. Some of that is due to the fact that it is radically different from other analytics software. Some is an unavoidable byproduct of its extreme power and flexibility. And, as with any software, some is due to design decisions that, in hindsight, could have been better. If you have experience with other analytics tools, you may at first find R very alien. Below is a list of complaints about R that I commonly hear from people taking my R workshops. Unhelpful Help R’s help files are often thorough and usually contain many working examples. Another confusing aspect to R’s help files stems from R’s ability to add new capabilities (called methods) to some functions as you load add-on packages. So an R beginner has to learn much more than a SAS or SPSS beginner before he or she will find the help files very useful. Misleading Function or Parameter Names Another command that commonly confuses beginners is the simple “if” function.