MSCI 561 - Intro to R and Coding with AI

Fall (3) Weng

This course is aimed at people with no programming experience, to get participants comfortable using R. After taking this course, participants will be able to read data into R, wrangle data in preparation for analysis, conduct analysis and visualization, learn how to write functions and debug code. The course emphasizes workflow and reproducibility. Articulation of questions is first, followed by a plan for analysis, which is then translated to pseudocode, to provide the marching orders for writing computer code. The course also teaches you how to use generative AI tools to convert your pseudocode to computer code, greatly accelerating your work. Writing good pseudocode is not easy, and evaluating AI output requires domain knowledge of programming, sousing AI tools successfully is not easy. This is not a statistics course, but rather a methods course to teach you how to use R. It is a useful precursor to statistics and modeling classes that use R.