(Part 2) Best products from r/rstats

Feedback would be greatly appreciated on this one. It's a prototype analysis for a book idea I had.

I'm toying with the idea of writing a book about statistical analyses of classic games. The target audience would be mathematically interested laypeople, much like Jeffrey Rosenthal's book Struck by Lightning ( https://www.amazon.ca/Struck-Lightning-Jeffrey-S-Rosenthal/dp/0006394957 ).

The twist would be that chapter would contain step-by-step R code or Python code so that the reader could do the same analysis and make changes based on their own questions.

I love ggplot2. But if you're going to use it, take the time to really learn how it works. It's much more than a replacement for the base plot() function, and it has its own logic and grammar. I'd recommend Hadley's ggplot2 book or the DataCamp ggplot2 course.

I really enjoy using this book for reference material. It depends on what you are trying to learn, though. You won't find code examples in it.

What you will find, however, is a ton of different methods and examples of how to apply them (contextually). You'd probably need to have a least a basic idea of how to begin the analysis to make it useful. (For instance, I'm modeling a binary event, I need a logit or probit, start w/ that chapter; or I'm modeling a rank, Tobit).

https://www.amazon.com/Deep-Learning-R-Francois-Chollet/dp/161729554X

Keras in R

https://keras.rstudio.com

But like the top comment says, Python is where most of the support is and will likely continue to be

I believe you posted a link on this subreddit a while back to an early version of the project. I liked what I saw well enough to pre-order a hard copy through Amazon. Any news on the release date for the retail book?

As a book for beginning R programmers, I would recommend The Art of R Programming: A Tour of Statistical Software Design, written by Norman Matloff. As a general machine learning book, I liked this book, written by Peter Flach.

Three very good introductory textbooks for statistics are:

Mendenhall, Statistics https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Probability-Statistics-William-Mendenhall/dp/1133103758

Larson and Farber https://www.amazon.com/Elementary-Statistics-Picturing-World-Books/dp/0321901118

Peck and Devore https://www.amazon.com/Statistics-Exploration-Analysis-Available-Titles/dp/0840058012

Buy used, older editions of each, and you can get them very cheap. These are all well explained, beginner texts.

Have you checked out Faraway's linear models book? Very readable. I believe he has most of it published on Cran's documentation site for free.

A similar query at StackOverflow generated a recommendation for Winston Chang's R Graphics Cookbook, which I don't have but looks like I should pick up...

But not quite sure what you mean by "pulling data" -- depending on what you actually have to do (attach to an Oracle data mart via ODBC? read in a SAS dataset? Need to keep SAS data formats and the like?) you might need different kinds of documentation...

Both JAGS and BUGS use the same language and can perform very similar operations. JAGS is more portable across operating systems, so for that reason, I would suggest JAGS (BUGS is generally limited to Windows). However, documentation/blog posts/forum posts (which exist in abundance!) for both languages will generally work for either tool. If you are looking for a textbook, Doing Bayesian Data Analysis provides a nice introduction to both bayesian statistics as well as JAGS.

Outside of JAGS/BUGS, there exists another similar language for performing Bayesian statistics called Stan (also described in the above book). Stan is newer, and often times will "run faster" than JAGS, however it does not directly support as many types of analyses.

My advice would be to learn JAGS while simultaneously learning the basics of Bayesian methods. Once you understand the basics of JAGS, try exploring Stan!

This book might be a helpful start: https://www.amazon.com/Analyzing-Baseball-Data-Chapman-Hall/dp/1466570229

I used data camp and I recommend it because it covers both programming in base R and the full tidyverse library. I did the R programming course and it covered everything from functional programming to object oriented programming in R.

If you don’t want to do a monthly subscription, purchase Hadley Wickams (author of the tidyverse) book R for Data Science

I'm a REML mixed-model advocate and highly recommend this book http://www.amazon.com/Mixed-Effects-Models-S-PLUS-Statistics-Computing/dp/1441903178

https://www.amazon.com/Analysis-Regression-Multilevel-Hierarchical-Models/dp/052168689X is the definitive text on the subject. I highly recommend this book to understand the fundamentals of multilevel modeling.

I think that something like the book below is what you are seeking for starters


http://www.amazon.co.uk/Modern-Optimization-R-Use/dp/3319082620/

Yea, I feel you. I mean, I don't have tendonitis from typing, but I've had it from climbing and it really sucks, no two ways about it nor around it.

1) Mid-term solution: Vim-adaptation

I would, in that case, highly recommend switching to Vim. (not emacs, because that tendonitis will be back from all the C-x C-c C-? nonsense) Everything is basically a small movement of your finger away, and you don't use the mouse at all. These days, that really is the point of vim, is avoiding the restriction of having to use mouse to accomplish everything in a GUI which doesn't have any button-alternatives for UI.

2) Short-term solution: R-keycuts

A vim setup, its configuration and "getting-used-to", takes time, and is understandably a lot to take on. So, in the short-term, as you mentioned -- R keycuts.

The Keycuts can be viewed & modified by CMD+?, then type "Modify.." and it comes up in mac search. In Windows I'm sure there's something similar. They are ultimately stored as a JSON file in the ~/.R/ directory, and so are very portable. Config. your stuff like crazy without worry that you'll have to do it all over again in the event of switching systems. My dotfiles-repo automates this when I switch between macs, using git. But if you primarily work in RStudio, and only have to manage one dotfile, copying it over is trivial.

For example, I have ^P to "Switch Focus between Source/Console", i.e. in RStudio, from editor to console. You can search the key commands more-or-less semantically, if you think about a keyword of something you want to do. Learning keycuts ad-hoc, as ideas arise, is the better way imo.

3) Long-term solution: Fix your tendonitis

Biologically speaking, tendonitis is caused by an inflammation of the tendons. That much is common knowledge. However, causally-speaking, tendonitis is caused NOT by over-use of a muscle, but rather, under-use of its antagonist. Not a lot of people understand this, even PT's, but there is really no such thing as over-use of a muscle, at least practically speaking. They're built to be inflamed such that they encourage the adaptive response. But that adaptive response necessitates fluid exchange with the blood-to-tissue-to-lymph, as the cellular debris of unaligned/unattached or straight-out dead cells must be cleared by Macrophages, which arrive by the blood, and taken into the lymph.

Lymph, however, has no brute-force pump (the heart) like the blood has, to ensure its circulation. Instead, our body's functioning relies upon: (1) valves to trap backflow, and (2) incidental muscle contraction/relaxation, to promote adequate circulation of the lymph, circulating eventually back into the blood after having gone through the filtering/clearance systems in the human body.

Why does any of this matter? Well if your inflamed muscle has a weak buddy of an antagonist, it's going to constantly be winning tug-of-war. Keep in mind that muscles are basically stiff-ish water-bags, that can pull themselves tight. Have you ever pinched a hose? How well does it circulate water? Not well at all. In fact, its build-up will reach an asymptote, and water will just stop flowing even if the faucet is open.

So, to get down to brass tacks, how can you promote the necessary circulation to ensure your inflamed muscles get the debris clearance, and resource allocation they need?

Exercise your antagonist. For wrist-borne tendonitis, it is the set of wrist/hand-extensors, found on the hairy-side of your forearm.

Here is some equipment that makes this comprehendible & convenient:

• https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0007W2FJA/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
  
• https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=finger+stretchers
  

Mostly Harmless Econometrics is a classic. It gets into regression, but also design with inference in mind. Combine that with ISLR and you should be set!

Here's the direct link to the book on Amazon.