Statistics

About

I learned how to use R, R Markdown, and LaTeX so that I could make my statistics homework and tests look better. See my work on github.

Motivation

I always do my best to prepare for challenging tasks. When I took Math 490 my junior year of college I had no prior experience with statistics. Yung-Pin Chen allowed me to take his course because he knew that I had programming and mathematical experience/skills and that I ask useful questions in class. He is also a very kind person who works hard to see his students succeed.

Prior to beginning the semester I decided to focus on learning R (the language we would be using in class) so that I would have a little bit catch-up work to do early on in the semester. It was when I was learning about R Studio that I first discovered the idea of a computational essay and decided to try my hand at it.

Tools Used

I used R Studio to do all my coding. I created R Markdown projects, which are typed in a standard Markdown language. R Studio lets you embed and run code in your Markdown project so I used R when applicable on the daily homework assignments. When my assignments were due, I exported my markdown to an html document through R Studio and printed the results. Later in the semester I learned that I could install a small(ish) version of LaTeX that would allow me to export my homework as a pdf document, and I began to do this. Additionally, I learned that I could use programming languages other than R with my Markdown. I used this to my advantage during our section on Monte Carlo simulations when I occasionally chose to code in Python instead of R in order to get performance improvements.