Reproducible Statistics course for the future, from Stata to R
Mwai, Kennedy, Amos Thairu, Mwangi Tabitha, Fegan Greg · Figshare · 2015
Reproducibility being laudable and frequently called for, we should be instilling this practice in students before they set out to do research. The maturity and extensive reproducibility abilities of Git, R and RStudio based materials make an excellent choice for professional statistical skills training. The most commonly used statistical softwares namely SAS, SPSS and STATA can cost over US$500 for a single license and over US$5,000 for a discounted twenty user access and can be challenging to create reproducible courses for universities and training institutions. Currently, it has been observed that the trend is changing and R popularity is rising. This talk will focus on the success of converting a two weeks statistical methodology for the design and analysis of epidemiological studies (SMDAES) course from Stata based to R based reproducible course using RMarkdown or LaTeX, Git and GitHub, R and RStudio server. We present the importance of using Git ,R and RStudio as tools for statistical workshops and institution trainings over commercial based tools.The talk shows the success of teamwork on Git while creating the course materials.