Biostatistics 230 Statistical Graphics Fall 2008

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Fall 2008 handouts, homeworks, course notes, and computer labs.
2008 Course Information Sheet.
2008 Goals of the Course.


This class will be offered Fall 2008. It is open to all Biostatistics graduate students and quantitatively trained graduate students in other departments. Grading involves homework, producing your own new graphic, some data analysis projects, simulation projects, saving the world and a final graphical data analysis project of your own data.

2008 Class Times

Class will meet Tue 12-12:50 Thur 12-1:50 in CHS 41-235 (note correction) and computer lab will meet 1:00 -- 1:50 or 2:00 -- 2:50 (pick one) Tuesday in CHS A1-241.
Labs will meet all Tuesdays including the first Tuesday Sept 30.
No lecture on Oct 21. There will be LAB this day, Oct 21, possibly no-host, depending on when I am able to arrive.

Office Hours

Monday 12-12:50 Thur 2-2:50

Finals week: Mon Dec 8 11:00, Tues Dec 9 10:00 (note changed time from original schedule)

Textbooks

No text. However, there are several good books out there:

A good reference is R Graphics by Paul Murrell and published by Chapman and Hall (CRC Press).
See also Lattice: Multivariate Data Visualization with R by Deepayan Sarkar.
We will read An Introduction to R. This is available with the R distribution as well as from this link.

An Introduction to R by Venables, Smith and the R development core team.
Murrell's web site.
Publisher's web site for the book.
The R software homepage.

R software

The software for the class is R. The latest version of the R software is available for download. It runs on Mac, Windows and Unix machines.

Download R and install it on your home computer

To download R, click on the link to R.
Pick a "CRAN Mirror."
I usually use Berkeley when I download the latest version of R.
Under Precompiled Binary Distributions, click on "Windows".
Click on "base".
Click on "R-2.7.2-win32.exe".
Save to disk and run the installation.
This gives you R and the main packages that run in R. There are tons of additional packages as well.

If you start R, you can get end the program by typing "q()" into the command line editor (without the quotes of course). Alternatively go to the file menu and select "Exit". In answer to the question about saving your session, I recommend "No" not saving it when in the computer lab, but on your own computer enter "Yes" and save it.

After installing R, you may install Murrell's book's R package.
Start R and go to the Packages menu. Go to "Set CRAN mirror...". Pick a USA mirror. Go back to the Packages menu. Select "Install Packages ..." A menu box will appear. Go down a long way until you find "RGraphics". Select it and click "OK". To produce figure 1.1 from Murrell's book, type 'figure1.1()' (without the quotes) into R. Similarly for any other figure.

Some other courses on statistical graphics

Jennifer Cook at Columbia.
Cleveland at Purdue.


Robert Weiss			   http://rem.ph.ucla.edu/~rob/
Department of Biostatistics         e-mail: robweiss at ucla.edu
UCLA School of Public Health                FAX: (310) 267-2113
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1772 USA            Phone: (310) 206-9626


Phone: (310) 206-9626

Robert Weiss's home page.

Office Hours.