Course content is designed to be flexible to accommodate student interest and abilities. The order and timing of course topics may change as the semester progresses.
Readings
In the table below, R4DS refers to R for Data Science by Garrett Grolemund and Hadley Wickham and, while GCR refers to Geocomputation with R by Robin Lovelace, Jakub Nowosad, and Jannes Muenchow (CRC Press, 2018).
Homework Homeworks are due at 5pm on the Friday of the week specified below.
| Week | Title | Description | Assignment | Readings | Package Presentation Group |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 8/28 | Introduction & Overview | Course Motivation & Objectives. Workflow & repeatable research in an era of big data. Getting started with R & RStudio. Data structures (vectors, matrices, data frames). | R4DS 1-2 | ||
| 9/4 | Graphics | The grammar of graphics: ggplot2 | R4DS 3 | ||
| 9/11 | Data Wrangling | Data Transformation: Filtering, selecting, transforming | R4DS 4-5 | 1 | |
| 9/18 | Data Wrangling 2 | Joining data | 9/21 DataCamp | R4DS 11-13 | 2 |
| 9/25 | Spatial Vector Data | Vector data processing. Integrating ‘traditional GIS’ analyses with statistical modelling. Data intersection, overlays, zonal statistics | GCR 1-2 | 3 | |
| 10/2 | Spatial Raster Data | Gridded spatial data | 10/5 DataCamp | GCR 3-4 | 4 |
| 10/9 | Creating Workflows | Example A ‘mini’ project: Sea level rise in Bangladesh | Project Proposal | R4DS 6-10 | 5 |
| 10/16 | Reproducible Research & Literate Programming | Data I/O. RMarkdown to create dynamic research outputs. Publishing to github/word/html/etc. | 10/19 DataCamp | R4DS 11, 26-30 | 6 |
| 10/23 | APIs, time-series, and weather Data | Processing daily weather data from NOAA | 7 | ||
| 10/30 | Satellite Data Processing | MODIS Satellite data | Homework # 4 | 8 | |
| 11/6 | High Performance Computing & Software Integration | Parallel processing and high performance computing in R, Calling other programs from within R. | Project 1st draft for peer assessment | 9 | |
| 11/13 | Dynamic Visualization | Interactive web-based visualizations | Peer Evaluation Due | R4DS 28 | 10 |
| 11/20 | Thanksgiving | (no class) | |||
| 11/27 | Modeling Basics | Building and summarizing models | Second draft of project Due 12/1 at midnight | R4DS 23-25 | |
| 12/4 | Final Project Presentations | 5 minute presentation of your final project | |||
| 12/14 | Final Project Due in UBLearns | See Project description for more information |