Workshop on Visualization Using R: Duncan Murdoch

The University of Calgary Biostatistics Centre (UCBC), a centre within the O'Brien Institute for Public Health, is hosting a day-long event on data visualization. Data visualization shows patterns and complex relationships in data. It is a critical step in data exploration and analysis in every discipline that uses data to inform their understanding of complex processes and relationships. In the era of big data, visualization of data has taken on even greater importance. This workshop will provide an introduction to statistical visualization using R. R is becoming the leading software package for statistical analysis and presentation, and is widely used in academia and industry. This workshop will concentrate on the R packages ggplot2 (widely used in presentation graphics) and rgl (used in 3D interactive graphics). It will be a full-day workshop, with a lecture-style presentation in the morning, and a hands-on component in the afternoon. Sample datasets will be supplied, but participants will also be encouraged to bring their own data and visualization problems.

Speaker Biography:

Professor Duncan Murdoch is a Professor Emeritus at the University of Western Ontario. He was the recipient of the Distinguished Service Award from the Statistical Society of Canada in 2005. From 2010 to 2013 he was a member of the Statistics section of the NSERC Mathematics and Statistics Evaluation Group and was Chair of the section in his last year. Duncan is co-author of the book, A First Course in Statistical Programming with R, Second Edition (Cambridge University Press, 2016). Prof. Murdoch recently retired as President from R Core, the group that develops R. He spent 14 years supporting and extending the package. He continues to develop the rglpackage for 3D interactive graphics. He has 16 packages in CRAN, and is in the 97th percentile for impact in the R software domain – a world expert in R.