Advanced Statistics - Multivariate

Course Description

This course is aimed at graduate students in anthropology who will need to analyze the increasingly large and complex datasets collected in our field. The course takes an applied approach to statistics: it prioritizes teaching theory, “how-to” skills, and critical thinking over teaching the math underlying the models. Students will leave this course equipped with the skills needed to perform data management and wrangling, transformations, and statistical modeling. Skills are taught using R, a free and open source statistical computing language. No prior experience with R or with programming is necessary, but willingness to learn these skills is expected.

Syllabus

The syllabus is available here. It does not have associated readings. This is because I use a mixture of open source textbooks, online tutorials, and videos to reinforce the concepts I teach in lecture. I link all of these resources from our institutional LMS. The primary textbooks used are linked in the syllabus.

Link to course materials

The course is delivered in R over Posit Cloud. The entire course was developed in a GitHub repository, which is available here. You should note a few things about this repository.

First, this is my development repository and as such it is not very “clean” - there are multiples of different files for example, and they are not necessarily labelled in a user-friendly way.

Second, this was the first iteration of the course and it is a bit rough. It will get cleaned up in Spring ‘24, and that repository will replace the one from Spring ‘23.

Third, the course is aimed at graduate students who need to learn applied statistical skills, and not necessarily all of the underlying math. While I do introduce equations and highlights their components, I do not ask students do to much math.