New R Programming Course to be Offered in Spring 2017

Hood College’s Graduate School is offering a new course focused on R programming this spring. The course, Advanced Data Analytics with R, is being offered by the Computer Science and Information Technology department.

According to Dr. Stephen Penn, program director of the Masters in Management Information Technology program and one of the faculty members who worked on developing the course, the course is being introduced to address the rise of job postings requiring R proficiency.  Also, the R programming language is gaining in popularity according to several websites, especially KDNuggets.

Students who take this course will receive an introduction to R, become familiar with the use of R in solving problems in statistics, and by the end of the semester be able to continue to learn about R packages and advanced functionality.  Students will use R to develop decision trees, neural networks, and regression models.

Penn added that the department plans to offer the course at least once a year in the spring semester. However, initial feedback about the course has been very high and the department is considering offering the course again in the fall.

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