[R] ordinal variables

Fri Jun 4 12:24:53 CEST 2010

Hi,

If you look around a bit, there is some great material on the web
about the powers and quirks of R. I've taught myself most of what I
know from R through reading a lot and trying it out on the console.
The help list is also a darn fine source of efficient code for a set
of general problems.

It won't help any more this year, but I'm working on a guide for R to
bundle valuable information I got from the help list and the internet.
It should be ready in a couple of months, and it will be available for
all to use. In any case, Owen's guide is of great value for an
introduction to the command line and basic statistics:
http://cran.r-project.org/doc/contrib/Owen-TheRGuide.pdf

Also the introduction to R is a must-read for all our students :
http://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/R-intro.pdf

Next to that, a couple of websites are great additional sources of code :
Quick-R, a guide for those who come over from SAS/SPSS/Stata. It
contains tons of examples for statistical analyses in about every
field. If you didn't know it yet, you'll love it for sure :
http://www.statmethods.net/

The R graph gallery, to show what exactly can be done with the
graphical power of R :
http://addictedtor.free.fr/graphiques/

The R Graphics gallery, doing the same :
http://research.stowers-institute.org/efg/R/

There's many more to be found, a whole community of users is
contributing to the information in various ways. We give the sources
mentioned here to our students, with the message that they should
never underestimate the power of Google.

Last but not least, there is a specific mailing list regarding
teaching statistics using R:
https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-teaching

You might want to take a look at their archives as well.

Cheers
Joris

On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 6:39 AM, Iasonas Lamprianou <lamprianou at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Thanks, I'll have a go and will let you know. I guess that the success has to do with how efficiently I help them to demonstrate the efficiency of code over menues. So part of the issue is how I teach them as well...
>
>
> Dr. Iasonas Lamprianou
>
>
> Assistant Professor (Educational Research and Evaluation)
> Department of Education Sciences
> European University-Cyprus
> P.O. Box 22006
> 1516 Nicosia
> Cyprus
> Tel.: +357-22-713178
> Fax: +357-22-590539
>
>
> Honorary Research Fellow
> Department of Education
> The University of Manchester
> Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, UK
> Tel. 0044  161 275 3485
> iasonas.lamprianou at manchester.ac.uk
>
>
> --- On Thu, 3/6/10, S Ellison <S.Ellison at lgc.co.uk> wrote:
>
>> From: S Ellison <S.Ellison at lgc.co.uk>
>> Subject: Re: [R] ordinal variables
>> To: "Joris Meys" <jorismeys at gmail.com>, "Iasonas Lamprianou" <lamprianou at yahoo.com>
>> Cc: r-help at r-project.org
>> Date: Thursday, 3 June, 2010, 15:44
>> If you set them a problem that has
>> them doing the same sort of thing
>> five times and compare the time it takes with code pasted
>> from an editor
>> (eg Tinn-R) and the time it takes via menius, you may have
>> more luck
>> convincing them.
>>
>> A command line sequence is harder than menus the first two
>> times but
>> easier for any n iterations thereafter.
>>
>> Steve ellison
>>
>> >>> Iasonas Lamprianou <lamprianou at yahoo.com>
>> 03/06/2010 14:51 >>>
>> Thank you Joris,
>> I'll have a look into the commands you sent me. They look
>> convincing. I
>> hope my students will also see them in a positive way
>> (although I can
>> force them to pretend that they have a positive attitude)!
>>
>> Dr. Iasonas Lamprianou
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Assistant Professor (Educational Research and Evaluation)
>>
>> Department of Education Sciences
>>
>> European University-Cyprus
>>
>> P.O. Box 22006
>>
>> 1516 Nicosia
>>
>> Cyprus
>>
>> Tel.: +357-22-713178
>>
>> Fax: +357-22-590539
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Honorary Research Fellow
>>
>> Department of Education
>>
>> The University of Manchester
>>
>> Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, UK
>>
>> Tel. 0044  161 275 3485
>>
>> iasonas.lamprianou at manchester.ac.uk
>>
>>
>> --- On Thu, 3/6/10, Joris Meys <jorismeys at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>> From: Joris Meys <jorismeys at gmail.com>
>> Subject: Re: [R] ordinal variables
>> To: "Iasonas Lamprianou" <lamprianou at yahoo.com>
>> Cc: r-help at r-project.org
>>
>> Date: Thursday, 3 June, 2010, 14:35
>>
>> see ?factor and ?as.factor. On ordered factors you can
>> technically do a
>> spearman without problem, apart from the fact that a
>> spearman test by
>> definition cannot give exact p-values with ties present.
>>
>> x <- sample(c("a","b","c","d","e"),100,replace=T)
>>
>> y <- sample(c("a","b","c","d","e"),100,replace=T)
>>
>> x.ordered <-
>> factor(x,levels=c("e","b","a","d","c"),ordered=T)
>>
>> x.ordered
>> y.ordered <-
>> factor(y,levels=c("e","b","a","d","c"),ordered=T)
>> y.ordered
>>
>> cor.test(x.ordered,y.ordered,method="spearman")
>>
>> require(pspearman)
>>
>> spearman.test(x.ordered,y.ordered)
>>
>> R commander has some menu options to deal with factors. R
>> commander
>> also provides a scripting window. Please do your students a
>> favor, and
>> show them how to use those commands.
>>
>>
>> Cheers
>> Joris
>>
>>
>> On Thu, Jun 3, 2010 at 2:25 PM, Iasonas Lamprianou
>> <lamprianou at yahoo.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>> Dear colleagues,
>>
>>
>>
>> I teach statistics using SPSS. I want to use R instead. I
>> hit on one
>> problem and I need some quick advice. When I want to work
>> with ordinal
>> variables, in SPSS I can compute the median or create a
>> barchart or
>> compute a spearman correlation with no problems. In R, if I
>> "read" the
>> ordinal variable as numeric, then I cannot do a barplot
>> because I miss
>> the category names. If I read the variables as characters,
>> then I cannot
>> run a spearman. How can I read a variable as numeric, still
>> have the
>> chance to assign value labels, and be able to get table of
>> frequencies
>> etc? I want to be able to do all these things in R
>> commander. My
>> students will probable be scared away if I try anything
>> else other than
>> R commander (just writing commands will not make them
>> happy).
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> I hope I am not asking for too much. Hopefully there is a
>> way
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
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>>
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>>
>> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained,
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>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Joris Meys
>> Statistical Consultant
>>
>> Ghent University
>> Faculty of Bioscience Engineering
>> Department of Applied mathematics, biometrics and process
>> control
>>
>>
>> Coupure Links 653
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>>
>> tel : +32 9 264 59 87
>> Joris.Meys at Ugent.be
>>
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>> reproducible code.
>>
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-- 
Ghent University
Faculty of Bioscience Engineering
Department of Applied mathematics, biometrics and process control

tel : +32 9 264 59 87
Joris.Meys at Ugent.be
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