Abstract

How can we help newcomers take their first steps into the world of data science and statistics? In this talk, I present ModernDive: An Introduction to Statistical and Data Sciences via R, an open source, fully reproducible electronic textbook available at ModernDive.com, co-authored by myself and Chester Ismay, Data Science Curriculum Lead at DataCamp. ModernDive’s authoring follows a paradigm of “versions, not editions” much more in line with software development than traditional textbook publishing, as it is built using RStudio’s bookdown interface to R Markdown. In this talk, I will present details on our book’s construction, our approaches to teaching novices to use tidyverse tools for data science (in particular ggplot2 for data visualization and dplyr for data wrangling), how we leverage these data science tools to teach data modeling via regression, and preview the new infer package for statistical inference, which performs statistical inference using an expressive syntax that follows tidy design principles.