Welcome to Lab

STA602 at Duke University

Introductions

• Meet the TA!

• Introduce yourself (icebreaker)

• Follow along these slides on the course website (under notes): sta602-sp26.github.io

• Bookmark this! It’s the course website.

What to expect in labs

• Discussion
• Practice problems
• Assistance on computing portion of homeworks

Tips

• Show up.
• Make use of office hours. Before you need help!

Beginnings

While this is not a computing class, computers are the workhorse of Bayesian statistics and we will use R to both enhance understanding of fundamental course material as well as to implement inference machinery to answer questions about real data sets.

Set up RStudio

Option 1 (easiest): RStudio container

• Go to https://cmgr.oit.duke.edu/containers and login with your Duke NetID and Password.
• Click RStudio to log into the Docker container. You should now see the RStudio environment.

If you haven’t previously done so, you will need to reserve a container for RStudio first.

Set up RStudio

Option 2 (recommended): RStudio on your computer

• Download R from http://www.r-project.org/.

• Download RStudio, the popular IDE for R, from https://posit.co/downloads/.

• (optionally) download Quarto from https://quarto.org/docs/get-started/

Getting started

Click here to go through a series of exercises that cover essential skills needed to succeed in this course. You can also find a link to “lab 0” by clicking on “Hello R” from the course schedule under “Assignment”.