PSY-GS-8875 | Behavioral Data Science | Spring 2024

Instructor

Alexander P. Christensen

Assistant Professor

Hobbs Hall, Room 221

alexander.christensen@vanderbilt.edu

Office Hours: by email

R packages

# CRAN packages
install.packages(
  pkgs = c(
    "remotes", "reticulate", "tictoc",
    "ggplot2", "caret", "glmnet", "GGally",
    "MASS", "ggpubr", "keras", "tensorflow", 
    "ranger", "cluster", "faraway",
    "NbClust", "factoextra", "aricode", 
    "EGAnet", "textdata", "tm", "tidyverse"
  )
)

# GitHub packages
remotes::install_github("AlexChristensen/toolchainR")
remotes::install_github("AlexChristensen/latentFactoR")
remotes::install_github("atomashevic/transforEmotion")

Course Outline

Week 1: Introduction and Retrieval-augmented Generation

Week 2: Regression and Classification (with gradient descent)

• (linear) regression

• classification (logistic regression)

• gradient descent

Week 3: Generalizability

• data splitting (training/testing)

• bootstrap

• (k-folds) cross-validation

Week 4: Ridge and LASSO Regularization

• ridge ($\ell_2$-norm) regression

• lasso ($\ell_1$-norm) regression

Week 5-6: (Artificial) Neural Networks

• artificial neural networks

• activation functions

• backpropagation

• training tips and tricks

Week 7-8: Trees and Forests

• classification and regression trees (CART)

• bootstrap aggregation (bagging)

• random forests

Week 9-10: $k$-means and Hierarchical Clustering

• distances

• $k$-means/mediods

• hierarchical clustering

Week 11-12: Exploratory Graph Analysis (EGA)

• (psychometric) networks

• network estimation

• community detection

• exploratory graph analysis

• unidimensionality

Week 12-13: EGA Framework

• bootstrap EGA

• local dependence detection (Unique Variable Analysis)

• (network) loadings and scores

• (metric) invariance

• hierarchical EGA

Week 14: Final Project

Data

Social Sciences

Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research

Open Psychometrics

Journal of Open Psychology Data

Open Science Framework

General

Kaggle

UCI Machine Learning Repository