Week 1 Notes - Course Introduction

Published

September 8, 2025

Key Concepts Learned

  • An overview of Git + GitHub
  • Quarto basics
  • An overview of R
  • tidyverse and dplyr

Coding Techniques

  • Why we use tidyverse (tibbles vs dataframes)
  • A review of basic data manipulation using dplyr in R (select, filter, mutate, summarize, groupby)
  • Quarto and how to generate good looking reports using markdown

Questions & Challenges

  • No major challenges this week.

Connections to Policy

  • Prof. Delmelle mentioned how the course, as opposed to the statistical analysis class, is focused on prediction.
  • In addition, public sector data science has very different goals than the private sector. Tradeoffs exist, and we’re not trying to simply optimize profit.

Reflection

  • I hadn’t used Quarto so it was cool to see how the code could be deployed using GitHub Pages.