Basic Data Types and Data Structures (Introduction to Statistical Computing)
Three-Toed Sloth 2013-09-04
Summary:
Introduction to the course: statistical programming for autonomy, honesty, and clarity of thought. The functional programming idea: write code by building functions to transform input data into desired outputs. Basic data types: Booleans, integers, characters, floating-point numbers. Subtleties of floating point numbers. Operators as basic functions. Variables and names. An example with resource allocation. Related pieces of data are bundled into larger objects called data structures. Most basic data structures: vectors. Some vector manipulations. Functions of vectors. Naming of vectors. Continuing the resource-allocation example. Building more complicated data structures on top of vectors. Arrays as a first vector structure. Matrices as a special type of array; functions for matrix arithmetic and algebra: multiplication, transpose, determinant, inversion, solving linear systems. Using names to make calculations clearer and safer: resource-allocation mini-example. Lists for combining multiple types of values; access sub-lists, individual elements; ways of adding and removing parts of lists. Lists as key-value pairs. Data frames: the data structure for classic tabular data, one column per variable, one row per unit; data frames as hybrids of matrices and lists. Structures of structures: using lists recursively to creating complicated objects; example with eigen.