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  1. Why R, when you already have Python
  2. Course objectives (verbatim)
  3. Course outcomes
  4. Units in this Course

Why R, when you already have Python

A fair question, and worth answering properly because you will be asked it.

R was built by statisticians, for statistics. Python is a general-purpose language that grew a data stack. That difference shows: a linear model in R is lm(y ~ x, data) and the summary already contains coefficients, standard errors, t-values, p-values and R². In Python you assemble that yourself.

R dominates in academic statistics, biostatistics, clinical trials and econometrics. Python dominates in production machine learning and engineering. The employable answer is that you can read and write both — and that is why this course sits beside Python for Data Analysis and Visualization rather than replacing it.

ggplot2 is also, plainly, the best plotting library in either language, and it is worth learning for that alone.

Course objectives (verbatim)

  1. Introduce the data science process, lifecycle, and applications in real-world domains.

  2. Build proficiency in R programming for data manipulation, exploration, and visualization.

  3. Train students in handling structured, unstructured, and time-based data effectively.

  4. Familiarize with basic machine learning and statistical modeling using R.

  5. Develop awareness of ethical, interpretability, and responsible use of data science.

Course outcomes

  1. Explain the Data Science process and perform EDA.
  2. Write R programs using variables, functions, loops and packages.
  3. Perform data wrangling, cleaning and visualization with dplyr, tidyr, ggplot2.

  4. Build and evaluate basic machine learning models such as regression and clustering.

  5. Apply data science techniques to practical case studies.

Units in this Course

UNIT 1

Introduction to the Data Science Process

Definition and applications; the Data Analytics Life Cycle; the toolkit and the team; exploratory data analysis; feature engineering and data transformation.

UNIT 2

Basics of R Programming

R and RStudio; data types and structures; operators; control structures and the apply family; functions and packages; reading CSV, Excel, JSON and XML.

UNIT 3

Data Handling and Visualization in R

The pipe and the five dplyr verbs; tidyr reshaping; missing data; dates and times; ggplot2 — grammar of graphics, geometries, scales, faceting and export.

UNIT 4

Applications and Case Studies

Simple and multiple regression; confusion matrix, precision, recall, ROC and AUC; K-Means clustering; text mining and TF-IDF; recommender systems; ethics in data science.

UNIT 5

Advanced Topics

Time series — decomposition, stationarity, differencing, ACF/PACF, ARIMA and forecasting; interactive plots with plotly; building web applications with R Shiny.

PRACTICE

Practice

Exam-style questions with fully worked solutions.

LAB

Lab

Every prescribed lab experiment, with code and expected output.

Next course in learning order: Python for Data Analysis and Visualization Statistics & analysis