Wrap-up: Where to go from here

Lecture 28

Dr. Benjamin Soltoff

Cornell University
INFO 2951 - Spring 2025

May 6, 2025

End-of-semester logistics

Remaining assignments

• Homework 10
• Extra credit
• Group project
• Final exam

Build a simple data science stack

RStudio Workbench

• Access to RStudio Workbench will end at some point after May 17th
• All INFO 2951 materials remain available in your repos on GitHub as long as you are an active student
• Any other work you have done on the server will not be accessible after the end of the semester
• Where will you go from here?

Software installation

Programming language

• R

IDE

• RStudio IDE
• VS Code
• Positron

Reproducibility

• Quarto
• Git

To {renv} or not to {renv}

Benefits

• Isolated
• Portable
• Reproducible

Drawbacks

• It’s a pain to configure for every project
• Some packages have issues installing via {renv}

Install some core R packages

# install the major packages from the course published on CRAN
install.packages(c(
  "tidyverse", "tidymodels", "devtools", "usethis",
  "colorspace", "janitor", "skimr", "tidytext", "styler"
))

# install a package hosted on GitHub
remotes::install_github(repo = "cis-ds/rcis")

Create a GitHub account

• Ordinary GitHub
• GitHub Enterprise for Cornell

Configure Git

usethis::use_git_config(
  user.name = "Your name", 
  user.email = "Email associated with your GitHub account"
  )

Painless authentication with PAT

Personal Access Token

• Uses HTTPS protocol
• Integrates with the {usethis} package to automate some Git workflows
• Alternative: use SSH

Setup PAT authentication

• GitHub.com
• GitHub Enterprise

Create PAT

usethis::create_github_token(
  scopes = c("repo", "user", "gist", "workflow"),
  description = "<DESCRIBE YOUR DEVICE>"
)

Store PAT

gitcreds::gitcreds_set()

#> ? Enter password or token: ghp_xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
#> -> Adding new credentials...
#> -> Removing credentials from cache...
#> -> Done.

Create PAT

usethis::create_github_token(
  scopes = c("repo", "user", "gist", "workflow"),
  description = "<DESCRIBE YOUR DEVICE>",
  host = "https://github.coecis.cornell.edu/"
)

Store PAT

gitcreds::gitcreds_set(url = "https://github.coecis.cornell.edu/")

#> ? Enter password or token: ghp_xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
#> -> Adding new credentials...
#> -> Removing credentials from cache...
#> -> Done.

What have you learned?

Learning objectives for INFO 2951

• Conduct exploratory data analysis through data wrangling and munging as well as visualizations and summary statistics.
• Identify patterns in data to make predictions or to identify associations between variables.
• Evaluate the strength of patterns using statistical and substantive significance.
• Implement data science workflows using common, reproducible methods and software tools.
• Use data ethically and responsibly.

Where to go from here

Courses

• INFO 3312: Data Communication
• INFO 3350: Text Mining for History and Literature
• INFO 3370: Studying Social Inequality Using Data Science
• INFO 3900: Causal Inference
• INFO 3950: Data Analytics for Information Science
• INFO 4100: Learning Analytics
• INFO 4390: Practical Principles for Designing Fair Algorithms
• INFO 4940: Applied Machine Learning

• CS/Statistics/Data Science

Find a community

Online communities

• Data Science Learning Community
• R Ladies
• Posit Community

Keep your skills fresh

• Integrate reproducible workflows into other courses/projects
• Tidy Tuesday
• Create a blog

Final exam on Saturday the 17th!