20 April 2018
“Good luck today. Don’t embarass us.”
Provide a broad overview of how the United States Military Academy at West Point uses R to improve cadet performance
What is West Point?
Who are we?
How we use R?
4 Year Academy
“Being a data scientist is when you learn more and more about more and more, until you know nothing about everything” - Will Curkierski
Doing Data Science Straight Talk from the Frontline By Cathy O’Neil, Rachel Schutt
And many more…
Course Organization
STEM Outreach
Teaching Tool
Army Decision Making
Improving Education / Cadet Experience
Do Students Learn Statistics Better in an Academically Homogeneous Classroom?
Overview
500 cadets a semester
17 cadets per classroom
11 Instructors
Develop model to predict performance
Designate Control / Treatment Group
Execute the semester / experiment
Evaluate results
Linear Regression
set.seed(206) lm1 <- train(ma206 ~ ., data = dataTrain, method = "lmStepAIC", trControl = fitControl)
LASSO
set.seed(206) lasso <- train(ma206 ~ ., data = dataTrain, method = "glmnet", trControl = fitControl)
Random Forest
set.seed(206) randforest <- train(ma206 ~ ., data = dataTrain, method = "rf", trControl = fitControl)
t.test(randomized,ability, mu = 0, alternative = "two.sided")
95% CI of difference in means: (-.010,.019)
mod = lm(FinalGrade~predictedgrade+abilityindicator, data = data) summary(mod)