STA/OPR 9750 - Pre-Assignments

In lieu of traditional homework, STA/OPR 9750 has weekly pre-assignments designed to achieve several interlocking goals:

  1. Provide initial exposure to that week’s topic before the lecture and lab session
  2. Allow students with less previous programming experience more time to familiarize themselves with that week’s topic
  3. Allow students to submit questions to be covered in class

Each Pre-Assignment will be submitted via CUNY Brightspace and due the night before class (Wednesdays at 11:45). These are short assignments, typically only a few questions, so extensions will not be given outside of exceptional circumstances.

Pre-Assignments

Pre-Assignment for Week #01

None.

Pre-Assignment for Week #02

Due Dates:

  • Released to Students: 2024-08-29
  • Due on Brightspace: 2024-09-04 at 11:45pm ET

In this Pre-Assignment, you will familiarize yourself with the basics of Markdown, an easy way to write and format documents. In class, we will use Markdown based tools to create dynamic data analysis documents seamlessly combining code, text, and graphics.

Pre-Assignment for Week #03

Due Dates:

  • Released to Students: 2024-09-05
  • Due on Brightspace: 2024-09-11 at 11:45pm ET

In this week’s preassignment, you will familiarize yourself with some basic “calculator math” in R. You will also see how function calls work as we get ready to start some proper R programming.

Pre-Assignment for Week #04

Due Dates:

  • Released to Students: 2024-09-12
  • Due on Brightspace: 2024-09-18 at 11:45pm ET

In this week’s preassignment, you will review dplyr’s “single-table” verbs. These are functions that take a single data frame and do something, typically returning another data frame. We can divide these into three major groups:

  • Subsetting rows (filter) and columns (select);
  • Changing and creating columns (mutate and less commonly, rename);
  • operating with group structure (group_by, summarize)

Pre-Assignment for Week #05

Due Dates:

  • Released to Students: 2024-09-19
  • Due on Brightspace: 2024-09-25 at 11:45pm ET

In this week’s preassignment, you will review dplyr’s most important “multi-table” verbs, the join operators. These are functions that take multiple data frames and combine them together. You will need to use this type of functionality to combine data from different sources together in a principled and organized fashion. You will also learn a bit about the pivot_longer and pivot_wider functions used to change the shape of data frames. These are particularly useful in conjunction with joins: you will often need to reshape two tables to “join” properly (typically, lengthening them with pivot_longer) and then reshape them for downstream presentation (typically with pivot_wider).

Pre-Assignment for Week #06

None.

The 2024-10-10 class session will be dedicated to Course Project Proposals.

Pre-Assignment for Week #07

Due Dates:

  • Released to Students: 2024-10-10
  • Due on Brightspace: 2024-10-16 at 11:45pm ET

In this week’s preassignment, we begin to explore the wonderful world of statistical graphics.

Pre-Assignment for Week #08

Due Dates:

  • Released to Students: 2024-10-17
  • Due on Brightspace: 2024-10-23 at 11:45pm ET

In this week’s preassignment, we dive deeper into the world of statistical graphics, watching statistical graphics in the hands of a master.

Pre-Assignment for Week #09

Due Dates:

  • Released to Students: 2024-10-24
  • Due on Brightspace: 2024-10-30 at 11:45pm ET

In this week’s preassignment, we review the basics of reading data files into R.

Pre-Assignment for Week #10

None.

The 2024-11-07 class session will be dedicated to Course Project Mid-Semester Check-Ins.

Pre-Assignment for Week #11

Due Dates:

  • Released to Students: 2024-11-07
  • Due on Brightspace: 2024-11-13 at 11:45pm ET

In this week’s preassignment, students are introduced to the basics of CSS selectors.

Pre-Assignment for Week #12

Due Dates:

  • Released to Students: 2024-11-14
  • Due on Brightspace: 2024-11-20 at 11:45pm ET

TBA

Pre-Assignment for Week #13

Due Dates:

  • Released to Students: 2024-11-21
  • Due on Brightspace: 2024-12-04 at 11:45pm ET

TBA

Pre-Assignment for Week #14

None.

The 2024-12-12 class session will be dedicated to Course Project Final Presentations.