Getting started with R

Back in 2017-18, I started teaching a course in a business school – instead of including a lot of theoretical frameworks, I opted to go with the basics and some implementation and tooling concepts. One of the tools that I chose to teach was how to use R in business analytics.

For those of you who do not know R, here is a helpful wiki article on the same.

Teaching what is broadly a scripting language to graduate students who havent written a single line of code is a humbling experience. You cannot take concepts such as variables, control loops, libraries as taken for granted since the exposure to these has been minimal. So how does one pack all that information into simple, usable instructions?

This is what I did.

Use free MOOCs

For students to understand the basic concepts of R – vectors, assignments, matrix, simple functions, etc, I prefer free MOOC such as the Introduction to R by Datacamp. The course is simple, it has the R ide within the practice area and allows for easy practice sessions and a playground to test your scripts while you are reading through the course material. I find this super useful for application oriented courses.

Right before jumping into the actual concepts of how R can be used for business analysis, this basic introduction course helps in establish a good solid base for participants who want to get started with R.

Use multiple datasets

I typically start these sessions with a financial data set. Credit card usage statistics, or some such information. However, I realized that students do better if they are able to relate to the date. During the length of the course, I found that switching to a course such as movie data (and thanks to IMDB for opening up their database) or cricket data made a lot more sense. It became easier for the participants to apply conceptual learning on the data sets.

See and Do

We used to incorporate several practice sessions in the class. This included getting the basics, writing scripts and getting started with R.

Some of the easier ways are –

  1. Use the R-Studio IDE installer
  2. Use the Anaconda Navigator
  3. Use an online tool like Rdrr

Using Google Analytics to Power your Content Marketing Efforts

Content Velocity Experiment in Google Analytics

Almost all blogs / content based websites use some format of web analytics or the other. This post is for those folks who are running content focused sites and need cues from Google Analytics data on what to write.

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Internet Marketing and Your Business

If you own a business, you may or may not know a lot about internet marketing. Internet marketing is an extremely important part of growing your business these days, yet too many business owners don’t realise how important. They think that by handing out a few business cards, they can grow their business and make more money. I’m afraid not! Read on to learn more about internet marketing and your business!

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9 Blog Promotion Tactics [Infographic]

A picture is worth a thousand words. Not for a SEO professional though!

I love infographics. Not only are they a beautiful way of driving home a point, but also people remember the key takeaways from visual media much more as compared to text.

These are some interesting tips to promote your blog, and I have to say that I am guilty of not following all of them.

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Correctly using the Read More tag

Read More tag

As a blogger who has been writing for the past 5 years or so, I was always confused about the Read More tag. This is a tag that you will find in your WordPress editor besides the Toolbar Toggle button.

Why would one want to insert their content with this tag? Wouldn’t it fill up your blog content with such intermediate tags and break the reader’s flow? Let’s go find out how to correctly use the Read More tag.

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What is Rat DOTA?

DOTA can be an exciting game, where two teams clash against each other in order to take down the opponent’s Ancient Structure. Often at times, one team works exceptionally well in team fights – perhaps their combinations are better timed, or their heroes have synergies … or they are simply the better players. In which case, they keep winning team fights. This is where Rat DOTA comes into play.

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Terracotta Army in Rise of Nations

When playing Rise of Nations, one of the concepts in the game are wonders.

One of the wonders that arguably gets rushed is the Terracotta Army. What this wonder gives you is an unending stream of Light Infantry units at regular intervals, the interval is dependent upon the number of units already produced by the wonder. So that over a period of time, the production rate of Light Infantry goes down and plateaus.

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