Category: R

Bayesian Optimization for Sequential Decisions with Multi-Arm Bandits

Join our workshop titled Bayesian Optimization for Sequential Decisions with Multi-Arm Bandits, which is a part of our workshops for Ukraine series! 


Here’s some more info: 



Title: Bayesian Optimization for Sequential Decisions with Multi-Arm Bandits

Date: Thursday, October 23rd, 18:00 – 20:00 CEST (Rome, Berlin, Paris timezone)

Speaker: Jordan Nafa is a Data Scientist and Bayesian Statistician who has previously worked at Game Data Pros, where he designed and built production systems for Bayesian optimization and experimentation in major mobile and console games. He was previously a PhD Candidate in Political Science at the University of North Texas, where he taught undergraduate courses in causal inference, statistics, and American political behavior.

Description: This workshop introduces Bayesian optimization and multi-armed bandits. It covers sequential decision problems, Thompson Sampling, and multi-arm bandits. The workshop is designed for those with a basic understanding of traditional experimental design and analysis approaches, such as those commonly applied in A/B testing, who want to learn about Bayesian methods for sequential decision-making. The workshop includes practical examples of implementing multi-arm bandit algorithms and their generalizations in R and Python using Stan and PyMC.

Minimal registration fee: 20 euro (or 20 USD or 800 UAH)








Please note that the registration confirmation is sent 1 day before the workshop to all registered participants rather than immediately after registration


How can I register?



  • Save your donation receipt (after the donation is processed, there is an option to enter your email address on the website to which the donation receipt is sent)

  • Fill in the registration form, attaching a screenshot of a donation receipt (please attach the screenshot of the donation receipt that was emailed to you rather than the page you see after donation).

If you are not personally interested in attending, you can also contribute by sponsoring a participation of a student, who will then be able to participate for free. If you choose to sponsor a student, all proceeds will also go directly to organisations working in Ukraine. You can either sponsor a particular student or you can leave it up to us so that we can allocate the sponsored place to students who have signed up for the waiting list.


How can I sponsor a student?


  • Save your donation receipt (after the donation is processed, there is an option to enter your email address on the website to which the donation receipt is sent)

  • Fill in the sponsorship form, attaching the screenshot of the donation receipt (please attach the screenshot of the donation receipt that was emailed to you rather than the page you see after the donation). You can indicate whether you want to sponsor a particular student or we can allocate this spot ourselves to the students from the waiting list. You can also indicate whether you prefer us to prioritize students from developing countries when assigning place(s) that you sponsored.


If you are a university student and cannot afford the registration fee, you can also sign up for the waiting list here. (Note that you are not guaranteed to participate by signing up for the waiting list).



You can also find more information about this workshop series,  a schedule of our future workshops as well as a list of our past workshops which you can get the recordings & materials here.


Looking forward to seeing you during the workshop!










 










Structural Bayesian Techniques for Experimental and Behavioral Economics, With applications in R and Stan workshop

Join our workshop on Structural Bayesian Techniques for Experimental and Behavioral Economics, With applications in R and Stan, which is a part of our workshops for Ukraine series! 


Here’s some more info: 


Title: Structural Bayesian Techniques for Experimental and Behavioral Economics, With applications in R and Stan


Date: Thursday, October 16th, 18:00 – 20:00 CEST (Rome, Berlin, Paris timezone)


Speaker: James Bland (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7117-9998) is an Associate Professor at the University of Toledo (USA). His research interests are at the intersection experimental economics and econometrics, and are especially focused on applied Bayesian econometrics. His free online book “Structural Bayesian Techniques for Experimental and Behavioral Economics, With applications in R and Stan” (https://jamesblandecon.github.io/StructuralBayesianTechniques/section.html) is a practical guide to doing these things, and covers many techniques that he and others have developed in this field.


Description: If you have an economic model, then in principle you can estimate its parameters using structural techniques. In experimental and behavioral economics these models typically describe how people make decisions, describing phenomena such as distributional preferences, risk-aversion, time preferences, levels of strategic thinking, and strategies used by players in games. Bayesian techniques lend themselves especially well to estimating these models for at least three reasons. Firstly, hierarchical Bayesian modeling handles well the heterogeneity we can expect there to be between participants in economic experiments. Secondly, when doing structural estimation, we are often interested in reporting transformations of our model’s parameters, and this is very easy to implement in the Bayesian framework. Finally, recent developments in the software for estimating Bayesian models have made doing this easier and less computationally taxing. 


This workshop will introduce you to structural modelling of data from economic experiments. We will use data from real economic experiments to estimate these models using Stan. Stan is a free probabilistic programming language, and is usable within R with the library RStan. Using a model of other-regarding preferences as an example, we will learn about how to build a full probabilistic model from an economic model that makes deterministic predictions. We will then build into this model some plausible between-participant heterogeneity. Finally, we will use our model to make an out-of-sample prediction.


Minimal registration fee: 20 euro (or 20 USD or 800 UAH)


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Please note that the registration confirmation is sent 1 day before the workshop to all registered participants rather than immediately after registration


How can I register?



  • Save your donation receipt (after the donation is processed, there is an option to enter your email address on the website to which the donation receipt is sent)

  • Fill in the registration form, attaching a screenshot of a donation receipt (please attach the screenshot of the donation receipt that was emailed to you rather than the page you see after donation).

If you are not personally interested in attending, you can also contribute by sponsoring a participation of a student, who will then be able to participate for free. If you choose to sponsor a student, all proceeds will also go directly to organisations working in Ukraine. You can either sponsor a particular student or you can leave it up to us so that we can allocate the sponsored place to students who have signed up for the waiting list.


How can I sponsor a student?


  • Save your donation receipt (after the donation is processed, there is an option to enter your email address on the website to which the donation receipt is sent)

  • Fill in the sponsorship form, attaching the screenshot of the donation receipt (please attach the screenshot of the donation receipt that was emailed to you rather than the page you see after the donation). You can indicate whether you want to sponsor a particular student or we can allocate this spot ourselves to the students from the waiting list. You can also indicate whether you prefer us to prioritize students from developing countries when assigning place(s) that you sponsored.


If you are a university student and cannot afford the registration fee, you can also sign up for the waiting list here. (Note that you are not guaranteed to participate by signing up for the waiting list).



You can also find more information about this workshop series,  a schedule of our future workshops as well as a list of our past workshops which you can get the recordings & materials here.


Looking forward to seeing you during the workshop!










 






From a slow analysis script to a fast and structured program in R workshop

Join our workshop titled From a slow analysis script to a fast and structured program in R, which is a part of our workshops for Ukraine series! 


Here’s some more info: 


Title: From a slow analysis script to a fast and structured program in R

Date: Thursday, October 9th, 18:00 – 20:00 CEST (Rome, Berlin, Paris timezone)

Speaker: Johan Zvrskovec is a postdoctoral researcher at the Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Centre, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King’s College London. Johan has a PhD in statistical genetics from King’s College London (KCL), an MSc in Genetic, Environmental,  and Developmental Psychology from KCL, and an MSc in Bioinformatics from Uppsala University (UU). He also has experience from IT system development (analysis, relational databases, web applications, communication) in academia and industry.

The research topics that interest Johan are refinement of genetic/phenotypic associations in Genome Wide Association Studies (GWAS) using factor analytical models, machine learning, and statistics, while investigating the aetiology of complex human behavioural traits such as personality and psychiatric disorders. Johan is an avid proponent of social justice and equity. Having spent time both in Ukraine and Russia in the past, he is keen on helping prevent Russia’s ongoing and racially motivated invasion wars.


Description: This workshop will aim to improve the speed, compartmentalisation, and modularity of bulky analysis scripts in the R programming language. We will cover:

Loops, and general issues with memory management during control flows, affecting speed

The package data.table

R classes

R packages

Relational databases (if time)


Minimal registration fee: 20 euro (or 20 USD or 800 UAH)




Please note that the registration confirmation is sent 1 day before the workshop to all registered participants rather than immediately after registration


How can I register?



  • Save your donation receipt (after the donation is processed, there is an option to enter your email address on the website to which the donation receipt is sent)

  • Fill in the registration form, attaching a screenshot of a donation receipt (please attach the screenshot of the donation receipt that was emailed to you rather than the page you see after donation).

If you are not personally interested in attending, you can also contribute by sponsoring a participation of a student, who will then be able to participate for free. If you choose to sponsor a student, all proceeds will also go directly to organisations working in Ukraine. You can either sponsor a particular student or you can leave it up to us so that we can allocate the sponsored place to students who have signed up for the waiting list.


How can I sponsor a student?


  • Save your donation receipt (after the donation is processed, there is an option to enter your email address on the website to which the donation receipt is sent)

  • Fill in the sponsorship form, attaching the screenshot of the donation receipt (please attach the screenshot of the donation receipt that was emailed to you rather than the page you see after the donation). You can indicate whether you want to sponsor a particular student or we can allocate this spot ourselves to the students from the waiting list. You can also indicate whether you prefer us to prioritize students from developing countries when assigning place(s) that you sponsored.


If you are a university student and cannot afford the registration fee, you can also sign up for the waiting list here. (Note that you are not guaranteed to participate by signing up for the waiting list).



You can also find more information about this workshop series,  a schedule of our future workshops as well as a list of our past workshops which you can get the recordings & materials here.


Looking forward to seeing you during the workshop!










 









Effective and useful feature engineering workshop

Join our workshop on Effective and useful feature engineering, which is a part of our workshops for Ukraine series! 


Here’s some more info: 


Title: Effective and useful feature engineering


Date: Thursday, October 2nd, 18:00 – 20:00 CEST (Rome, Berlin, Paris timezone)


Speaker: Emil Hvitfeldt is a software engineer at Posit and part of the tidymodels team’s effort to improve R’s modeling capabilities. He maintains several packages within the realms of modeling, text analysis, and color palettes. Trying to make slidecrafting a well respecting verb. He co-authored the book Supervised Machine Learning for Text Analysis in R with Julia Silge. Working on book Feature Engineering A-Z.


Description: Feature engineering is one of the fundamental part of the modeling pipeline that is often overlooked to great dismay. This workshop will go over a number of practical examples, going over the most common problems that feature engineering solves. Including dealing with numeric predictors, time predictors, and categorical predictors. A practical component is included, which will use the R package {recipes} and its extension packages.


Minimal registration fee: 20 euro (or 20 USD or 800 UAH)



Please note that the registration confirmation is sent 1 day before the workshop to all registered participants rather than immediately after registration


How can I register?



  • Save your donation receipt (after the donation is processed, there is an option to enter your email address on the website to which the donation receipt is sent)

  • Fill in the registration form, attaching a screenshot of a donation receipt (please attach the screenshot of the donation receipt that was emailed to you rather than the page you see after donation).

If you are not personally interested in attending, you can also contribute by sponsoring a participation of a student, who will then be able to participate for free. If you choose to sponsor a student, all proceeds will also go directly to organisations working in Ukraine. You can either sponsor a particular student or you can leave it up to us so that we can allocate the sponsored place to students who have signed up for the waiting list.


How can I sponsor a student?


  • Save your donation receipt (after the donation is processed, there is an option to enter your email address on the website to which the donation receipt is sent)

  • Fill in the sponsorship form, attaching the screenshot of the donation receipt (please attach the screenshot of the donation receipt that was emailed to you rather than the page you see after the donation). You can indicate whether you want to sponsor a particular student or we can allocate this spot ourselves to the students from the waiting list. You can also indicate whether you prefer us to prioritize students from developing countries when assigning place(s) that you sponsored.


If you are a university student and cannot afford the registration fee, you can also sign up for the waiting list here. (Note that you are not guaranteed to participate by signing up for the waiting list).



You can also find more information about this workshop series,  a schedule of our future workshops as well as a list of our past workshops which you can get the recordings & materials here.


Looking forward to seeing you during the workshop!










 







Intro to C++ programming for R applications for Econometricians workshop

Join our workshop on Intro to C++ programming for R applications for Econometricians, which is a part of our workshops for Ukraine series! 


Here’s some more info: 


Title: Intro to C++ programming for R applications for Econometricians


Date: Thursday, September 25th, 18:00 – 20:00 CEST (Rome, Berlin, Paris timezone)


Speaker: Tomasz Woźniak is a Bayesian econometrician developing new econometric methods for applied macroeconomic research. He has been a specialised R user for seventeen years, and has recently joined The R Journal as an Associate Editor. He is the author of several R packages, available at https://bsvars.org/, that combine blazingly fast algorithms written in C++ with the convenience of data analysis in R. He works as a senior lecturer at the University of Melbourne, where he has an extensive research, teaching, and engagement portfolio. He is also an external collaborator at the International Labour Organization, where he develops a new forecasting system and an R package.


Description: The session will facilitate attendees in starting programming in C++ for R applications. To learn how to do that, Tomasz has read several books, tens of articles, and taken a few online courses, so you don’t have to 😉 The session will focus on


+ working with C++ in RStudio,


+ assuring object compatibility between C++ and R using the package Rcpp,


+ using basic algorithmic structures like loops, conditional execution, and functions,


+ using the functions written in C++ in R (it’s super simple!),


+ performing linear algebra using the package RcppArmadillo, and


+ using fast random number generators.


A sequence of hands-on exercises with applications for econometricians supports all this.

Minimal registration fee: 20 euro (or 20 USD or 800 UAH)







Please note that the registration confirmation is sent 1 day before the workshop to all registered participants rather than immediately after registration


How can I register?



  • Save your donation receipt (after the donation is processed, there is an option to enter your email address on the website to which the donation receipt is sent)

  • Fill in the registration form, attaching a screenshot of a donation receipt (please attach the screenshot of the donation receipt that was emailed to you rather than the page you see after donation).

If you are not personally interested in attending, you can also contribute by sponsoring a participation of a student, who will then be able to participate for free. If you choose to sponsor a student, all proceeds will also go directly to organisations working in Ukraine. You can either sponsor a particular student or you can leave it up to us so that we can allocate the sponsored place to students who have signed up for the waiting list.


How can I sponsor a student?


  • Save your donation receipt (after the donation is processed, there is an option to enter your email address on the website to which the donation receipt is sent)

  • Fill in the sponsorship form, attaching the screenshot of the donation receipt (please attach the screenshot of the donation receipt that was emailed to you rather than the page you see after the donation). You can indicate whether you want to sponsor a particular student or we can allocate this spot ourselves to the students from the waiting list. You can also indicate whether you prefer us to prioritize students from developing countries when assigning place(s) that you sponsored.


If you are a university student and cannot afford the registration fee, you can also sign up for the waiting list here. (Note that you are not guaranteed to participate by signing up for the waiting list).



You can also find more information about this workshop series,  a schedule of our future workshops as well as a list of our past workshops which you can get the recordings & materials here.


Looking forward to seeing you during the workshop!










 








RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) in R with ragnar workshop

Join our workshop on RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) in R with ragnar, which is a part of our workshops for Ukraine series! 


Here’s some more info: 


Title: RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) in R with ragnar


Date: Thursday, September 11th, 18:00 – 20:00 CEST (Rome, Berlin, Paris timezone)


Speaker: Sharon Machlis is a long-time tech journalist and former director of editorial data & analytics for media company Foundry (Computerworld, InfoWorld, and others), now (mostly) retired. She is the author of “Practical R for Mass Communication and Journalism” (CRC Press) and was the host of InfoWorld’s “Do More With R” video series. She has presented at a number of conferences including the European R User Meeting and Investigative Reporters & Editors’ computer-assisted reporting conference, and she’s slated to give a lightning talk at posit::conf(2025).


Description: Would you like to ask an LLM questions about a specific collection of documents? One of the most popular techniques for doing this is RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation). And now RAG has come to the R tidyverse.

In this workshop you’ll learn how to use the ragnar and ellmer packages to process documents, retrieve portions of those docs that are most relevant to a query, and send that data to an LLM to generate a response.

We’ll start by going through the InfoWorld article How to Create Your Own RAG Application in R demo, which analyzes Workshop for Ukraine information to answer natural-language questions like “What workshops will help me improve my R data visualization skills?”

We’ll then apply what we’ve learned to a new data set: posit::conf(2025) conference sessions, so you can answer questions like “Are there any generative AI sessions happening on Thursday morning?”

This is a hands-on workshop demonstrating code. If you want to follow along, it will help to have a basic understanding of R and R functions. 


Minimal registration fee: 20 euro (or 20 USD or 800 UAH)




Please note that the registration confirmation is sent 1 day before the workshop to all registered participants rather than immediately after registration


How can I register?



  • Save your donation receipt (after the donation is processed, there is an option to enter your email address on the website to which the donation receipt is sent)

  • Fill in the registration form, attaching a screenshot of a donation receipt (please attach the screenshot of the donation receipt that was emailed to you rather than the page you see after donation).

If you are not personally interested in attending, you can also contribute by sponsoring a participation of a student, who will then be able to participate for free. If you choose to sponsor a student, all proceeds will also go directly to organisations working in Ukraine. You can either sponsor a particular student or you can leave it up to us so that we can allocate the sponsored place to students who have signed up for the waiting list.


How can I sponsor a student?


  • Save your donation receipt (after the donation is processed, there is an option to enter your email address on the website to which the donation receipt is sent)

  • Fill in the sponsorship form, attaching the screenshot of the donation receipt (please attach the screenshot of the donation receipt that was emailed to you rather than the page you see after the donation). You can indicate whether you want to sponsor a particular student or we can allocate this spot ourselves to the students from the waiting list. You can also indicate whether you prefer us to prioritize students from developing countries when assigning place(s) that you sponsored.


If you are a university student and cannot afford the registration fee, you can also sign up for the waiting list here. (Note that you are not guaranteed to participate by signing up for the waiting list).



You can also find more information about this workshop series,  a schedule of our future workshops as well as a list of our past workshops which you can get the recordings & materials here.


Looking forward to seeing you during the workshop!










 








Efficient R – How to write faster code workshop

Join our workshop on Efficient R – How to write faster code, which is a part of our workshops for Ukraine series! 


Here’s some more info: 


Title: Efficient R – How to write faster code


Date: Thursday, August 28th, 18:00 – 20:00 CEST (Rome, Berlin, Paris timezone)


Speaker: Selina Baldauf, Selina is a theoretical ecologist and a scientific programmer at the Freie Universität in Berlin. She supports researchers in writing clear, efficient, and reproducible code, with a focus on practical, applied solutions. Her work includes teaching R, data analysis, and scientific coding to her fellow researchers. With a PhD in ecology and a passion for computer science, she helps scientists bridge the gap between ecological research and programming.


Description: Writing efficient R code is key to handling large datasets, reducing runtimes, and making your workflows more scalable. In this workshop, you’ll learn practical strategies to find and fix performance issues and how to use packages that improve code speed and memory efficiency. The topics include:

– Profiling and benchmarking to find slow code and compare alternatives with `profvis` and `microbenchmark`

– Best practices to avoid common bottlenecks

– Efficient data analysis using packages like `data.table`, `collapse`, and `arrow`

– Parallelization with packages from the `futureverse`

– C++ integration to boost performance further with `Rcpp`

The session includes live demonstrations and code examples to follow during or after the workshop. Whether you’re an experienced R user looking to optimize your code, or a beginner curious about writing more efficient scripts, this session offers insights and tools you can apply to your work.


Minimal registration fee: 20 euro (or 20 USD or 800 UAH)





Please note that the registration confirmation is sent 1 day before the workshop to all registered participants rather than immediately after registration


How can I register?



  • Save your donation receipt (after the donation is processed, there is an option to enter your email address on the website to which the donation receipt is sent)

  • Fill in the registration form, attaching a screenshot of a donation receipt (please attach the screenshot of the donation receipt that was emailed to you rather than the page you see after donation).

If you are not personally interested in attending, you can also contribute by sponsoring a participation of a student, who will then be able to participate for free. If you choose to sponsor a student, all proceeds will also go directly to organisations working in Ukraine. You can either sponsor a particular student or you can leave it up to us so that we can allocate the sponsored place to students who have signed up for the waiting list.


How can I sponsor a student?


  • Save your donation receipt (after the donation is processed, there is an option to enter your email address on the website to which the donation receipt is sent)

  • Fill in the sponsorship form, attaching the screenshot of the donation receipt (please attach the screenshot of the donation receipt that was emailed to you rather than the page you see after the donation). You can indicate whether you want to sponsor a particular student or we can allocate this spot ourselves to the students from the waiting list. You can also indicate whether you prefer us to prioritize students from developing countries when assigning place(s) that you sponsored.


If you are a university student and cannot afford the registration fee, you can also sign up for the waiting list here. (Note that you are not guaranteed to participate by signing up for the waiting list).



You can also find more information about this workshop series,  a schedule of our future workshops as well as a list of our past workshops which you can get the recordings & materials here.


Looking forward to seeing you during the workshop!










 







From Model to Meaning: How to use the marginaleffects R package to interpret results from statistical or machine learning models workshop

Join our workshop on From Model to Meaning: How to use the marginaleffects R package to interpret results from statistical or machine learning models, which is a part of our workshops for Ukraine series! 


Here’s some more info: 


Title: From Model to Meaning: How to use the marginaleffects R package to interpret results from statistical or machine learning models


Date: Thursday, August 14th, 18:00 – 20:00 CEST (Rome, Berlin, Paris timezone)


Speaker: Vincent Arel‑Bundock is a Professor of Political Science who conducts research and teaches on political economy and research methods. He is an advocate of transparent and reproducible research, and an active developer of open source software. He maintains several statistical software libraries for R and Python, including marginaleffects, modelsummary, and tinytable.


Description: Our world is complex. To make sense of it, data analysts routinely fit sophisticated statistical or machine learning models. Interpreting the results produced by such models can be challenging, and researchers often struggle to communicate their findings to colleagues and stakeholders. This tutorial is designed to bridge that gap. It offers a practical guide to model interpretation for analysts who wish to communicate their results in a clear and impactful way. Tutorial attendees will be introduced to the marginaleffects package and to the conceptual framework that underpins it. The marginaleffects package for R offers a single point of entry for computing and plotting predictions, counterfactual comparisons, slopes, and hypothesis tests for over 100 different types of models. The package provides a simple and unified interface, is well-documented with extensive tutorials, and is model-agnostic—ensuring that users can extract meaningful quantities regardless of the modeling framework they use. The book Model to Meaning: How to Interpret Statistical Results Using marginaleffects for R (forthcoming with CRC Chapman & Hall) introduces a powerful conceptual framework to help analysts make sense of complex models. It demonstrates how to extract meaningful quantities from model outputs and communicate findings effectively using marginaleffects. This tutorial will provide participants with a deep understanding of how to use marginaleffects to improve model interpretation. Attendees will learn how to compute and visualize key statistical summaries, including marginal means, contrasts, and slopes, and how to leverage marginaleffects for hypothesis and equivalence testing. The package follows tidy principles, ensuring that results integrate seamlessly with workflows in R, and with other packages such as ggplot2, Quarto, and modelsummary. This tutorial is suitable for data scientists, researchers, analysts, and students who fit statistical models in R and seek an easy, reliable, and transparent approach to model interpretation. No advanced mathematical background is required, but familiarity with generalized linear models like logistic regression is assumed.


Minimal registration fee: 20 euro (or 20 USD or 800 UAH)




Please note that the registration confirmation is sent 1 day before the workshop to all registered participants rather than immediately after registration


How can I register?



  • Save your donation receipt (after the donation is processed, there is an option to enter your email address on the website to which the donation receipt is sent)

  • Fill in the registration form, attaching a screenshot of a donation receipt (please attach the screenshot of the donation receipt that was emailed to you rather than the page you see after donation).

If you are not personally interested in attending, you can also contribute by sponsoring a participation of a student, who will then be able to participate for free. If you choose to sponsor a student, all proceeds will also go directly to organisations working in Ukraine. You can either sponsor a particular student or you can leave it up to us so that we can allocate the sponsored place to students who have signed up for the waiting list.


How can I sponsor a student?


  • Save your donation receipt (after the donation is processed, there is an option to enter your email address on the website to which the donation receipt is sent)

  • Fill in the sponsorship form, attaching the screenshot of the donation receipt (please attach the screenshot of the donation receipt that was emailed to you rather than the page you see after the donation). You can indicate whether you want to sponsor a particular student or we can allocate this spot ourselves to the students from the waiting list. You can also indicate whether you prefer us to prioritize students from developing countries when assigning place(s) that you sponsored.


If you are a university student and cannot afford the registration fee, you can also sign up for the waiting list here. (Note that you are not guaranteed to participate by signing up for the waiting list).



You can also find more information about this workshop series,  a schedule of our future workshops as well as a list of our past workshops which you can get the recordings & materials here.


Looking forward to seeing you during the workshop!










 






latent: R package for the efficient estimation of large latent variable models

Join our workshop on latent: R package for the efficient estimation of large latent variable models, which is a part of our workshops for Ukraine series! 


Here’s some more info: 

Title: latent: R package for the efficient estimation of large latent variable models


Date: Thursday, August 7th, 18:00 – 20:00 CET (Rome, Berlin, Paris timezone)


Speaker: MARCOS JIMENEZ (ORCID iD: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4029-6144) is a Doctoral student at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and Postdoctoral researcher at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. His research interests include computational statistics, rotation methods of factor models, causal modeling of latent factor models, and dimensionality assessment with graphical methods.

VITHOR ROSA FRANCO (ORCID iD: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8929-3238) is an assistant professor in the Post-graduate Program in Psychology at University of São Francisco. His research interests include measurement theory and quantitative modeling, being especially interested in Bayesian and computational methods applied to social decision making and educational assessment.


Description: Latent variable models are fundamental in psychology, education, and the social sciences. Yet their estimation often suffers from convergence issues and computational inefficiency, especially in large-scale applications. The latent R package addresses these challenges by providing a fast, flexible, and robust framework for latent variable modeling. Written in C++ and fully compatible with lavaan syntax, latent currently supports Factor Analysis and Latent Class Analysis, with planned extensions to Structural Equation Modeling (SEM), Item Response Theory (IRT), and Mixture Modeling. This presentation introduces the package’s core design, modeling capabilities, and optimization strategies, emphasizing its suitability for models that are otherwise computationally prohibitive. At the center of latent is an innovative optimization framework based on matrix manifolds, which ensures convergence by estimating covariance matrices over the partially oblique manifold. The package’s scalability is demonstrated through applications to personality data, showing that it consistently yields positive semi-definite solutions and avoids Ultra-Heywood cases in Factor Analysis. In addition, latent tackles local maxima in factor rotation and latent class models via fast, parallel estimation from multiple starting values. It also enables rapid computation of polychoric correlation matrices across hundreds of variables. Altogether, latent offers a high-performance, open-source solution for researchers needing both speed and generality in latent variable modeling.


Minimal registration fee: 20 euro (or 20 USD or 800 UAH)



Please note that the registration confirmation is sent 1 day before the workshop to all registered participants rather than immediately after registration


How can I register?



  • Save your donation receipt (after the donation is processed, there is an option to enter your email address on the website to which the donation receipt is sent)

  • Fill in the registration form, attaching a screenshot of a donation receipt (please attach the screenshot of the donation receipt that was emailed to you rather than the page you see after donation).

If you are not personally interested in attending, you can also contribute by sponsoring a participation of a student, who will then be able to participate for free. If you choose to sponsor a student, all proceeds will also go directly to organisations working in Ukraine. You can either sponsor a particular student or you can leave it up to us so that we can allocate the sponsored place to students who have signed up for the waiting list.


How can I sponsor a student?


  • Save your donation receipt (after the donation is processed, there is an option to enter your email address on the website to which the donation receipt is sent)

  • Fill in the sponsorship form, attaching the screenshot of the donation receipt (please attach the screenshot of the donation receipt that was emailed to you rather than the page you see after the donation). You can indicate whether you want to sponsor a particular student or we can allocate this spot ourselves to the students from the waiting list. You can also indicate whether you prefer us to prioritize students from developing countries when assigning place(s) that you sponsored.


If you are a university student and cannot afford the registration fee, you can also sign up for the waiting list here. (Note that you are not guaranteed to participate by signing up for the waiting list).



You can also find more information about this workshop series,  a schedule of our future workshops as well as a list of our past workshops which you can get the recordings & materials here.


Looking forward to seeing you during the workshop!










 






How to Use R with Excel workshop

Join our workshop on How to Use R with Excel, which is a part of our workshops for Ukraine series! 


Here’s some more info: 


Title: How to Use R with Excel


Date: Thursday, July 31st, 18:00 – 20:00 CET (Rome, Berlin, Paris timezone)


Speaker: Alyssa Columbus is a third-year Biostatistics PhD candidate, Vivien Thomas Scholar, and Center of Excellence in Regulatory Science and Innovation Scholar at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She has over ten years of statistical industry and research experience and currently focuses on developing practical, reproducible approaches to data analysis, especially within public health and biomedical research. Alyssa has extensive experience teaching R, having previously served on the R-Ladies Global Team; she is also the founder of R-Ladies Irvine and currently co-organizes R-Ladies Baltimore. Her contributions to open-source software have surpassed 50 million downloads, and she has authored technical guides, tutorials, and articles featured by leading organizations such as Google, Microsoft, Statista, the American Statistical Association (ASA), the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and O’Reilly Media.


Description: Alyssa Columbus will deliver an engaging tutorial introducing the use of R with Excel. Participants will learn practical steps for importing and exporting Excel workbooks using R, as well as techniques to perform common Excel data analyses – including visualizations and row and column calculations – directly within R. Throughout the session, attendees will have multiple opportunities to ask questions, and additional resources will be provided to support continued learning about the interoperability between R and Excel.


Minimal registration fee: 20 euro (or 20 USD or 800 UAH)



Please note that the registration confirmation is sent 1 day before the workshop to all registered participants rather than immediately after registration


How can I register?



  • Save your donation receipt (after the donation is processed, there is an option to enter your email address on the website to which the donation receipt is sent)

  • Fill in the registration form, attaching a screenshot of a donation receipt (please attach the screenshot of the donation receipt that was emailed to you rather than the page you see after donation).

If you are not personally interested in attending, you can also contribute by sponsoring a participation of a student, who will then be able to participate for free. If you choose to sponsor a student, all proceeds will also go directly to organisations working in Ukraine. You can either sponsor a particular student or you can leave it up to us so that we can allocate the sponsored place to students who have signed up for the waiting list.


How can I sponsor a student?


  • Save your donation receipt (after the donation is processed, there is an option to enter your email address on the website to which the donation receipt is sent)

  • Fill in the sponsorship form, attaching the screenshot of the donation receipt (please attach the screenshot of the donation receipt that was emailed to you rather than the page you see after the donation). You can indicate whether you want to sponsor a particular student or we can allocate this spot ourselves to the students from the waiting list. You can also indicate whether you prefer us to prioritize students from developing countries when assigning place(s) that you sponsored.


If you are a university student and cannot afford the registration fee, you can also sign up for the waiting list here. (Note that you are not guaranteed to participate by signing up for the waiting list).



You can also find more information about this workshop series,  a schedule of our future workshops as well as a list of our past workshops which you can get the recordings & materials here.


Looking forward to seeing you during the workshop!