Welcome to MSMR
Welcome to the Multivariate Statistics & Methodology in R (MSMR) lab workbook. Using the menu above, you can find lab materials for each week. These include sets of exercises along with walkthrough readings in which we introduce some of the more important R code.
Solutions
Solutions will be made available immediately below each exercise, in the week after they are set, so make sure to re-visit these pages to check your answers.
Asking Questions
We encourage you to use the various support options below. Details of these are also available on the weekly pages on Blackboard Learn.
- Drop-in sessions. We have an excellent team of tutors who are available at various slots throughout the week (all at different times of day). You can join a session and ask them anything about the exercises.
- Discussion Forums. There are weekly discussion forums for you to ask questions on any of the content from that week (or for you to share with other students any relevant materials you might have found useful). There are separate forums for questions concerning, for instance, course assessments, as well as a general forum for anything else.
- Office Hours of Lecturers and STCs. Lecturers and Senior Teaching Coordinators hold office hours every week. Feel free to drop in and ask any questions you might have about the materials, logistics of the course, or just come and say hi! You can also email the STCs at pg.ppls.stats@ed.ac.uk.
Tips on googling statistics and R
Searching online for help with statistics and R can be both a help and a hindrance.
If you have an error message in R, copy the error message into google. The results returned can sometimes just cause more confusion, but sometimes something might jump out at you and help you solve the problem. The same applies with searching the internet for help with statistics - search for “what is a p-value”, and you’ll find many many different articles and forum discussions etc. Some of them you will find too technical, but don’t be scared - the vast majority of people working in statistics may well find these too technical too. Some of them you might feel are too simple/not helpful. As a general guide, keep clicking around the search responses, and you may end up finding that someone, somewhere, has provided an explanation at the right level. If you find something during your search which you don’t quite understand, feel free to link it in a post on the discussion forum!
R Cheatsheets
You can find a collection of cheatshets that summarise some of the most useful commands you will be using for tasks such as data transformation, visualisation, RMarkdown and many others here/
Some key ones for this course are:
R Community
R has great representation in Edinburgh. Check out these pages to find out more:
And worldwide you have:
Figure 1: Artwork by @allison_horst