This course focuses on the concepts and tools behind reporting modern data analyses in a reproducible manner. Reproducible research is the idea that data analyses, and more generally, scientific claims, are published with their data and software code so that others may verify the findings and build upon them. The need for reproducibility is increasing dramatically as data analyses become more complex, involving larger datasets and more sophisticated computations. Reproducibility allows for people to focus on the actual content of a data analysis, rather than on superficial details reported in a written summary. In addition, reproducibility makes an analysis more useful to others because the data and code that actually conducted the analysis are available. This course will focus on literate statistical analysis tools which allow one to publish data analyses in a single document that allows others to easily execute the same analysis to obtain the same results.
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About this Course
What you will learn
Organize data analysis to help make it more reproducible
Write up a reproducible data analysis using knitr
Determine the reproducibility of analysis project
Publish reproducible web documents using Markdown
Skills you will gain
- Knitr
- Data Analysis
- R Programming
- Markup Language
Offered by

Johns Hopkins University
The mission of The Johns Hopkins University is to educate its students and cultivate their capacity for life-long learning, to foster independent and original research, and to bring the benefits of discovery to the world.
Syllabus - What you will learn from this course
Week 1: Concepts, Ideas, & Structure
This week will cover the basic ideas of reproducible research since they may be unfamiliar to some of you. We also cover structuring and organizing a data analysis to help make it more reproducible. I recommend that you watch the videos in the order that they are listed on the web page, but watching the videos out of order isn't going to ruin the story.
Week 2: Markdown & knitr
This week we cover some of the core tools for developing reproducible documents. We cover the literate programming tool knitr and show how to integrate it with Markdown to publish reproducible web documents. We also introduce the first peer assessment which will require you to write up a reproducible data analysis using knitr.
Week 3: Reproducible Research Checklist & Evidence-based Data Analysis
This week covers what one could call a basic check list for ensuring that a data analysis is reproducible. While it's not absolutely sufficient to follow the check list, it provides a necessary minimum standard that would be applicable to almost any area of analysis.
Week 4: Case Studies & Commentaries
This week there are two
Reviews
- 5 stars68.64%
- 4 stars22.97%
- 3 stars5.73%
- 2 stars1.62%
- 1 star1.02%
TOP REVIEWS FROM REPRODUCIBLE RESEARCH
A very important course that greatly improved my ability to communicate the findings of any sort of data analysis that I perform. This is a critical skill to acquire to "deliver the means."
I took this course as part of the Data Science specialization without any real expectation and realized that this subject is probably one of the most important in data analysis.
Very informative and enjoyable class. The importance of reproducible research is stressed clear and concisely, Roger D. Peng does a great job of explaining the material.
This course is very helpful in terms of not only doing the analysis but also getting to know the finer nuances of making a structured markdown document for future reproducible.
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