A First Course in Statistical Programming with R

This third edition of Braun and Murdoch's bestselling textbook now includes discussion of the use and design principles of the tidyverse packages in R, including expanded coverage of ggplot2, and R Markdown. The expanded simulation chapter introduces the Box–Muller and Metropolis–Hastings algorithms. New examples and exercises have been added throughout. This is the only introduction you'll need to start programming in R, the computing standard for analyzing data. This book comes with real R code that teaches the standards of the language. Unlike other introductory books on the R system, this book emphasizes portable programming skills that apply to most computing languages and techniques used to develop more complex projects. Solutions, datasets, and any errata are available from www.statprogr.science. Worked examples - from real applications - hundreds of exercises, and downloadable code, datasets, and solutions make a complete package for anyone working in or learning practical data science.

Developing political-ecological theory: The need for many-task computing

Models of political-ecological systems can inform policies for managing ecosystems that contain endangered species. To increase the credibility of these models, massive computation is needed to statistically estimate the model’s parameters, compute confidence intervals for these parameters, determine the model’s prediction error rate, and assess its sensitivity to parameter misspecification. To meet this statistical and computational challenge, this article delivers statistical algorithms and a method for constructing ecosystem management plans that are coded as distributed computing applications. These applications can run on cluster computers, the cloud, or a collection of in-house workstations. This downloadable code is used to address the challenge of conserving the East African cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus). This demonstration means that the new standard of credibility that any political-ecological model needs to meet is the one given herein.