The Statistical Society of Australia and Macquarie University are pleased to offer the following workshops:

Advanced R skills: Introduction to Shiny and Building R Packages

When: 23 and 24 September 2019, Macquarie University, NSW

About these workshops:

Introduction to Shiny

Shiny, the new web application framework for R has exploded in popularity in recent years. This framework facilitates the creation of web-based applets that are interactive and thus can be used as a modern supplement for data visualisation, data analysis and more. The shiny framework is built with the R language as a base that can capture all of R's vast library of data and statistical tools. This is paired with behind the scenes html and javascript in shiny enables deployment of statistical data analysis and machine learning onto a modern web browser (desktop, tablet and mobile). Almost any analysis done in R could be ported into shiny for an interactive app. Implementation of the apps can be local, directly on a user's machine or can be deployed for wider consumption on a Shiny server or via a hosting service. The course is intended for participants that have some knowledge of R but no knowledge of shiny or HTML/Javascript is assumed. Participants will learn the structure of a shiny app, how to create their own user interface, making the app reactive to user input, and touch on some more advanced techniques in app creation.

Building R Packages

This workshop will teach you how to build and develop your own R packages. Beginning by writing a very basic package with documentation, examples, and data, we will then cover package structure (main files and subdirectories: DESCRIPTION, NAMESPACE, R/, man/, inst/, data/) and the features of advanced packages (vignettes/, tests/, src/). The best practices for package development, such as version control via Git and Github, Checking and Releasing packages will also be demonstrated. The official manual,Writing R Extensions, will be referenced throughout.

About our presenters

Justin Wishart is a computational statistician/data scientist at Displayr. Before joining Displayr, he earned his PhD in Statistics at the University of Sydney and had appointments at University of Melbourne, UNSW Australia and Macquarie University. He has research interests in semi and non-parametric regression, change point analysis, inverse problems, empirical likelihood and general use of R and its modern extensions such as rmarkdown, shiny and the tidyverse.

Pierre Lafaye de Micheaux is a Canadian/French/Swiss statistician, born in France in 1973. After two post-docs at the Centre de Recherches Mathématiques de Montréal, and at the Brain Imaging Center of McGill University, he got an Assistant Professor position at Grenoble Alps University in 2003. From 2009 to 2010, he was also an Affiliate Researcher at the Grenoble Neuroscience Institute. In 2009, he moved to the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Université de Montréal, as an Assistant Professor. He was promoted to the Associate Professor level in 2011. From 2013 to 2014 he was a Senior Visiting Fellow to the Centre for Healthy Brain Ageing (School of Psychiatry) of UNSW Sydney. In 2015, he moved for almost two years to the French Engineering school of Statistics and Analysis of Information (CREST-ENSAI), as a Professor of Statistics. He joined the School of Mathematics and Statistics of UNSW Sydney in 2017.

Dr Lafaye de Micheaux works on both Mathematical and Applied Statistics, as well as on the development of R packages and on industrial applications (such as Machine Learning or Deep Learning techniques). He (co)-leads three research groups: Dependence Measures,(Neuro)Imaging Genetics and Data Science and IoT.

Following the workshop Building R Packages on the second day, participants are warmly invited to stay around for the SSA NSW Branch’s September meeting, featuring a talk by Dr Lafaye de Micheaux. Refreshments from 6pm, with the talk starting at 6:30pm.

Register before 10 September to take advantage of Early Bird discounts. Registrations close on 17 September.

For more information and to register for this event, please click here.

Kind regards

Marie-Louise Rankin
Executive Committee, SSA