Why are open source statistical programming languages the best?
Because they R.
It is August and Fall 2016 classes begin in just a couple of days. I am currently prepping for two large classes: I happy to see the incredible interest in my graduate course with over 50 students enrolled in ISE/DSA 5103 Intelligent Data Analytics! I will also be taking over Dr. Suleyman Karabuk’s ISE 4113 Decision Support Systems undergraduate course with nearly 80 students already enrolled!
To this end I am collecting as many new jokes and one-liners as possible — gotta to keep the material fresh. That said, to those of you who have yet to have taken any of my courses, my jokes are really not that funny, however, I do expect all students to laugh regardless. This is a price that must be paid. If you have any jokes, puns, etc. that are both short, clean, related to statistics or data science, and optionally are funny, please send them my way: cnicholson @ ou (dot) edu.
To support these two course I have tricked two unassuming graduate students into becoming TA’s for me. Sai Krishna Theja Bhavaraju has enthusiastically accepted the role of TA for ISE 4113 and Alex Rodriguez will be the TA for ISE 5103. Both of these TA’s are bright, friendly, and very helpful. If you are taking either of these two classes, please feel free to ask them for help. If you are not taking these classes, but you stumble across either of these two gentlemen, please buy them a beer — they have their work cut out for them!
Fall 2016 Classes
Intelligent Data Analytics is not an easy course. The homeworks and projects are notoriously challenging. In the class we address real-world data intensive problems by integrating human intuition with data analysis tools to draw out and communicate meaningful insights. Topics include problem approach and framing, data cleansing, exploratory analysis and visualization, dimension reduction, linear and logistic regression, decision trees, and clustering. Students will be introduced to a powerful open source statistical programming language (R) and work on hands-on, applied data analysis projects. I have heard from several former students that this has been a hard but useful course — at least six students that I know of who have taken this course have obtained jobs in analytics and data science fields at companies including Deloitte Consulting, Visual BI, GE Global Research, Nerd Kingdom, OKC Thunder, and Standard & Poors. Hopefully the skills you are introduced to in the class can be helpful to you in the future.
ISE 4113 is a Decision Support Systems course that exploits advanced features of MS Excel 2013 to model and build decision support applications. The course will start with the basics and quickly move into mathematical modeling, simulation, VBA, and GUI design. While this is the first time for me to teach this course, I have heard from students that the material they learn in this class has made a significant impact in their academic and professional lives. I hope to continue the track record of success with this course.