Beginner's Guide to Computation in Statistical Research

At some point, you will need to demonstrate that your statistical methods actually work in practice. Whether you are running a toy simulation, analyzing real-world data, or optimizing a complex neural network, you will need to write code. If you are new to computing, the wiki can be overwhelming. Read this page from top to bottom. It is designed to take you from installing your first language to running massive workflows on department servers.

Implementation

Your first goal is to translate mathematical algorithms into functional code.

Choosing and Installing a Programming Language
Help deciding between R, Python, Julia, or other languages and how to get them running on your personal machine.

Installing and Configuring an Integrated Development Environment
Your IDE (Integrated Development Environment) is your workshop. Learn how to set up VS Code or RStudio.

Beyond Print Statements: Breakpoint Debugging
Your IDE (Integrated Development Environment) is your workshop. Learn how to set up VS Code or RStudio.

Command Line Basics
Essential survival skills for navigating your computer without a mouse. (Required for Phase 2).

Scale and Efficiency

Once you have gotten the hang of implementing statistical algorithms in code, the next major hurdle will be making your workflows scalable and efficient. For code running on your own machine, you want to make sure you are using every CPU core and every bit of RAM as efficiently as possible. Even then, your personal computer alone can only get you so far. Thankfully, the department also provides several options for remote high-performance computing for even the largest of research workflows.

Title	Description	Reading Time?
Parallelization: Making the most of your Machine	How to run many experiments at once
Building Workflows on Remote Servers	Using the department servers and other computing clusters
Big Data Management	How to handle datasets that are measured in terabytes

Reproducibility and Collaboration

While it is important that you are able to obtain results efficiently, it is also equally important for other member of the academic community to arrive at your same results independently. Specifically, others should be able to run your workflow and obtain the exact same output as you did with minimal tinkering and friction.

Title	Description	Reading Time?
Version Control	Keeping track of code/experiment history
Dependency Management	Making sure anyone else in the world can run your workflow

Software Development

Topics like

• Developing python packages and Developing R packages