Instructions for working with assignments

ME314, LSE Methods Summer Programme 2021

Setting up R and the Rstudio environment

Using R/RStudio locally

For local installation, you can follow one of numerous instructions online, for example here. You should first install R and then RStudio.

Instructions for obtaining assignments

Each lab assignment will be a separate repository from the lse-me314 site on GitHub. Each day in lab, you should start with the following steps.

  1. Create a new RStudio project that clones the assignment repo in your RStudio environment.

    Each assignment of this course is created as a github repository. To work on the assigment, first you need to clone the respository (i.e. copy the entire repository). The easiest way to do so is through creating a new project.

    1) Click a project button (near the top-right corner of the screen) 2) Select “New Project” (this will open a popup window) 3) Select “Version Control” 4) Select “Git” 5) Enter repository URL (for the first assignment, it is https://github.com/lse-me314/assignment01)

  2. Rename the starter files.

    For each day, you will start with a starter file, which is in the RMarkdown format. You should embed your answers, with code, into your version of the instruction files. The starter file can be found in the project folder newly created in Step 1.

    The first thing you need to do is rename the starter file using your full name. For example, the first assignment file is named ME314_assignment1_LASTNAME_FIRSTNAME.Rmd, which you will need to rename by replacing the uppercase terms with your own last and first names, e.g. ME314_assignment1_Bloggs_Joe.Rmd.

    To rename files, you can Rstudio’s rename capability: from the “Files” pane, tick the file to rename, then click “Rename”. (Or, if you prefer the command line, you can use R’s file.rename() function.)

  3. Add your answers to the assignment by editing the renamed file.

  4. “knit” the .Rmd file, which executes the embedded R code and renders it and the embedded comments into html. From RStudio, you can knit the .Rmd file by clicking the “Knit HTML” button in the top of the editor pane in RStudio. The resulting HTML file will be saved in your working directory.

  5. (For the mid-term and final exam only) You can upload the resulting HTML file – renamed! – to the course Moodle page.

We will walk you through this process in the Day 1 lab, so don’t worry if it seems complicated the first time. This sort of careful workflow process and file management is part of learning practical data science too!

We do not mark the homework but we will walk through the solutions at the start of computer labs the following day.