Statistics with R
A Beginner's Guide
- Robert Stinerock - Baruch College, City University of New York, USA
With a clear step-by-step approach explained using real world examples, learn the practical skills you need to use statistical methods in your research from an expert with over 30 years of teaching experience. With a wealth of hands-on exercises and online resources created by the author, practice your skills using the data sets and R scripts from the book with detailed screencasts that accompany each script.
This book is ideal for anyone looking to:
• Complete an introductory course in statistics
• Prepare for more advanced statistical courses
• Gain the transferable analytical skills needed to interpret research from across the social sciences
• Learn the technical skills needed to present data visually
• Acquire a basic competence in the use of R and RStudio.
This edition also includes a gentle introduction to Bayesian methods integrated throughout.
The author has created a wide range of online resources, including: over 90 R scripts, 36 datasets, 37 screen casts, complete solutions for all exercises, and 130 multiple-choice questions to test your knowledge.
Supplements
This book is a treasure for both instructors and students. It is written by a master, award-winning teacher with an unparalleled expertise of getting difficult concepts across in a deceptively simple fashion. Written in clear functional English, it both teaches the usual applied statistical methods, as well as provides a gentle introduction to Bayesian methods throughout the book. This is, in essence, more of a new book than just a new edition of an existing one. However, the features that made the first edition so successful have been retained: a student needs only basic algebra to understand the conceptual formulations that are illustrated with hands-on real-life examples that will appeal to students and motivate them to understand the importance of statistics in their daily lives.
Introduction to statistics is a busy field, and Stinerock explains the subject in a careful and friendly manner. The inclusion of Bayesian methods in the second edition is an important contribution — when it is encountered at the beginning of the statistical journey, it allows the reader to appreciate the richness of the Bayesian approach without dealing with the analytical and computational complexities of the subject.
This book is a wonderful primer for learning both statistics and introductory R programming. It is clearly written, provides straightforward explanations of traditional and Bayesian methods, has a lot of supporting material for instructors and students including numerous practice data sets and solved exercises.
I found this book pretty useless. It uses an outdated R idiom (not tidyverse); it insists on "by-hand" calculation of statistical values with very little other explanation (as just one example, logistic regression seems to be treated as "another formula to learn"; students are phased by natural logarithms, and their relationship to exp(x), etc.; these things need to be explained!).
Perhaps most worryingly, the book has absolutely no information about data wrangling, etc., so if a student isn't handed data that happens to be in "long format" then they have absolutely no hope of analysing it. In fact the treatment of R and its functions is so cursory so as to be almost pointless. On a quick glance through, even basic things (na.rm (!), arguments such as "alternative=" for t.test() etc.) aren't covered.
I'm not very impressed with this -- there are far better alternatives available for free (for example at openintro.org).
Not as basic as I would have liked.