Wednesday, August 13, 2008, 9am-4pm
UMDNJ School of Public Health
683 Hoes Lane West, Room 2A
Piscataway, NJ 08854

Download flyer and application

A 1-day course providing
hands-on experience with:

• R basics, and more, for data professionals
• Example real Public Health applications
• Quality color graphics

Who Should Attend
Practitioners of epidemiology and statistical computing, with intermediate to advanced skills, who wish to do analysis and graphics in the R language on IBM compati-ble PCs, MacIntosh, or other computers running Windows NT, 2000, XP, Mac OS, Linux or Unix operating system.

Background
R is a public domain software package in active de-velopment by members of universities, government employees and company staff around the world. Books on R in many application areas are available. With R, the data professional can produce publication quality graphics with great flexibility, as well as fit epidemiological and statistical models of cutting edge interest. Many of the concepts originated as the S language at Bell Laboratories. A commercial version exists as the language Splus.

This course will focus on developing programs and applications in R with relevance to public health. This course appears on the NJLMN List of Courses with Approved 5.75 CE/LE hours. Participants are encouraged to bring datasets for discussion and graphing. This is an also opportunity to network with other data professionals. Prepare for an active autumn season.

Course Content
Hour 1: Introductions of attendees. Epi. and laboratory calculations. Sources of R documentation and software, installation and system considerations. Basics of R language. Reading data into R, from vari-ous file formats including interactively, EPI-INFO, Excel, DBASE, MDB, free and fixed format text files. Discussion of three Epi. Packages. *NEW*

Hour 2: Public health applications and biometric packages. A growth model fitting function for BMI, other body measurements. Wilkinson-Rogers Model notation. Experimental design analyses. Survey analysis. Epidemiological computations. Public Use datasets. LQAS, binary cusum, better Pareto charts.

Hour 3: Graphical facilities of R. Effective plotting. Importing and exporting of data and graphs. Programming, functions, libraries, programming, including user dialogs, recoding of data, and construction of customized menus. Application development exercises. Also, an innovative graphical grammar package.

Lunch break.

Hour 4-5: Algorithmic statistics *NEW* including recursive patitioning, randomForests, randomSurvivalForests. Regression and Survey analysis examples. Empirical Bayes rate smoothing. Problems and datasets discussions of attendee pro-jects. Future uses and developments of R including participation in user group, the UseR Conferences. Discussion of student datasets and problems. Course evaluation.

Preparatory Reading / Browsing

R for Beginners by Emmanual Paradis
R Reference Card by Tom Short
These and other documentation in PDF form, as well as R itself, are available at www.r-project.org by clicking on the Manuals link and then the Contributed Documentation link.

Practical reference books (there are many others):
Data Analysis and Graphics Using R: An example -based approach by John Maindonald and John Braun
Creating More Effective Graphs by Naomi B. Robbins

Faculty
Giles L. Crane, MPH, Research Scientist and Statistician, has extensive experience in statistical computing on a wide variety of computers in the pub-lic and private sectors.

Course Assistant: Oliver Giller is an experienced professional from the Early Intervention Program of the NJ Dept. of Health.

Location
Location  683 Hoes Lane, Piscataway, Room 2A , 9AM

Tuition
Course tuition is $25 for NJPHA Members and $35 for non-members of NJPHA. Tuition includes all instructional materials, R CD-ROM, continental breakfast, lunch, continuing education credits, and certificate. Please make check payable to NJPHA. Additional $10 for USB memory stick with R.

Application
Download the application, complete the application & email or mail  to:
Giles Crane
RE:  Epi. Computing Course
621 Lake Drive
Princeton, NJ  08540
Email: gilescrane@verizon.net

All applications must be received by August 1, 2008. Early enrollment is recommended as the class is limited to 20. Prior registration is required for the School of Public Health Site. Promptly after this date Acceptances will be sent by email, and parking tags/instructions will be sent by mail.