NEWS & MEDIA

NEWS

Faculty Development Workshop, Spring 2019

The Economics Faculty Development Workshop on "Introduction to R language for Data Analysis: A Brief Description" was held from 4th - 7th March, 2019. The workshop was conducted by Dr. Syeda Rabab Mudakkar, Assistant Professor, and Faculty of Basic Sciences Centre for Mathematics & Statistical Sciences, Lahore School of Economics.

Goal:

This 3 days hands-on workshop aimed to introduce R language, a powerful, flexible and well known software for statistical computing. The object oriented statistical software has a versatile collection of libraries compiled, contributed and maintained by users all over the world. The language is based on GNU free software license project and is similar to S-language developed by Bell Laboratories.

Agenda:

Day 1: Fundamentals of R language
Dr. Syeda Rabab Mudakkar started the session with "Hello World" in the R environment. Participants were introduced to R and R Studio, data types, data structures, variables, functions, loops etc. Next, how to import and export data files from various sources will be explained. Finally, manipulating data frames using 'dplyr' package and visualizing data using 'ggplot2' package was explored.

Day 2: Data Manipulation
Dr. Syeda Rabab Mudakkar focused on Data cleaning and Wrangling in R language. Topics of interest included merging and reshaping data sets, examine filtering, gather, separate function etc. using 'tidyverse' package. The data cleaning tools like profiling the data, examining outliers, validity checking and standardization was studied.

Day 3: Introduction to Machine Learning Methods
Dr. Syeda Rabab Mudakkar introduced Machine learning using R language. Machine learning methods assumes that computers can learn from data, identify patterns, evaluate algorithms, make predictions and improve from experience. The workshop offered hands-on exercise using supervised learning methods. The concept of data preparation and summarization, building models, cross validation and forecasting was examined.