If You Have–But You Really Should Make–Copious Spare Time to Educate Yourself About Big Data and Statistical Computing…

Cosma Shalizi is teaching his excellent Statistical Computing class for the fourth time–really worth following along if you want to be an order-giver rather than a spear-carrier in the Big Data technostructure of tomorrow today:

Class Announcement: 36-350, Statistical Computing, Fall 2014: Fourth time is charm: Instructors: Yours truly and Andrew Thomas. Description: Computational data analysis is an essential part of modern statistics. Competent statisticians must not just be able to run existing programs, but to understand the principles on which they work. They must also be able to read, modify and write code, so that they can assemble the computational tools needed to solve their data-analysis problems, rather than distorting problems to fit tools provided by others. This class is an introduction to programming, targeted at statistics majors with minimal programming knowledge, which will give them the skills to grasp how statistical software works, tweak it to suit their needs, recombine existing pieces of code, and when needed create their own programs…. The class will be taught in the R language, use RStudio for labs, and R Markdown for assignments. Pre-requisites: This is an introduction to programming for statistics students. Prior exposure to statistical thinking, to data analysis, and to basic probability concepts is essential…. The class may be unbearably redundant for those who already know a lot about programming. The class will be utterly incomprehensible for those who do not know statistics and probability.