Learning the R Language: A Workshop for Beginners

Learning the R Language: A Workshop for Beginners

R is becoming one of the most popular tools for data analysis, combining the flexibility of a programming language with a wide variety of data manipulation and analysis tools. It can be challenging to learn, however, especially for those who are new to programming. Using a hands-on approach, this workshop will push novices up the steepest part of the learning curve. By the end of the session, participants will:

• Understand the data types in R: numeric, logical, character and factor
• Work with the fundamental data structures in R: vectors and data frames
• Use sequences and indexing to select data from vectors and data frames
• Get data in and out of R
• Compute descriptive statistics
• Construct basic plots
• Calculate crosstabs using table(), by(), aggregate()
• Perform and interpret linear regression including R’s formula notation

This content gets participants through the most frustrating and confusing aspects of R and provides the foundation they need to learn other R functionality on their own. Participants are expected to type commands and inspect results using their own computers. Workshop material is based on Chapters 1-3 and 7 of the book R for Marketing Research. Slides and code for all chapters from the book are available online.

About the Instructor:

Elea McDonnell Feit, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at Drexel University’s LeBow College of Business and a Senior Fellow of Marketing at The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on leveraging customer data to make better product design and advertising decisions, particularly when data is incomplete, unmatched or aggregated. Much of her career has focused on developing new quantitative methods and bringing them into practice, first working in product design at General Motors, then commercializing new methods at the marketing analytics firm, The Modellers, and most recently as the Executive Director of the Wharton Customer Analytics Initiative, where she built the academic-industry partnership program. She brings a rich understanding of industry problems to her research, which has been published in Management Science and the Journal of Marketing Research. She enjoys making analytics and statistics accessible to a broad audience and has recently co-authored a book, R for Marketing Research and Analytics, with Chris Chapman. She regularly teaches popular tutorials and workshops for practitioners on digital marketing, marketing experiments, marketing analytics in R, discrete choice modeling and hierarchical Bayes methods, as well as undergraduate, MBA and MS Business Analytics classes at Drexel LeBow and Wharton. She holds a PhD in Marketing from the University of Michigan, an MS in Industrial Engineering from Lehigh University, and a BA in Mathematics from the University of Pennsylvania.

Contact Diana Jones, dej36@drexel.edu, for a corporate partner registration discount.