We previously learned to create our own Python functions to reduce how much we repeat ourselves in our code. In this post we see another example of the DRY principle (don’t repeat yourself) and we will learn how to ensure we don’t repeat ourselves between the different programs we write. A typical (bad) script to process data Below is an
Read more
Learning to program is not easy. We have to learn a new language and a new way of thinking. We have to learn the grammatical rules of the programming language we are learning, and the logic of our program, how it will work its way through the code and hopefully give us the answer we expect. In this post we
Read more
In statistics, we often want to fit a statistical model to be able to make broader generalizations. An important type of statistical model is linear regression, where we predict the linear relationship between an outcome variable and a predictor variable. In this post we will learn how to perform a simple linear regression in R. See our previous post for
Read more
Linear regression is one of the most versatile tools in the data analyst’s toolbox. While it can get quite complicated, simple linear regression is rather intuitive and straightforward. In this post we will look at a small dataset so that we can work through and visualise the logic of linear regression. A bigger version of this dataset will be used
Read more
In the first and second post of this series, we learned how to graph our data using histograms and Q-Q plots to see whether it is normally distributed, and quantify the shape of the distribution by considering skew and kurtosis. In this, the final post in this series, we will learn to use the Shapiro-Wilk test to determine whether data
Read more
In our previous post, we learned how to inspect whether or data were normally distributed or not using plots. It is always important to visualise our data. However, inspecting such plots is open for interpretation and, possibly, abuse. We will now learn how to analyse our data and generate numerical values that describe how our data are distributed. Quantifying the
Read more