Faculty

Learn how to use Qualtrics to create and launch a survey. The goal of this workshop is to provide an overview of the whole process along with some hands-on exercises. The workshop will start with instruction on how to build a survey, then will cover getting it ready for the field, and finish with showing users how to distribute, monitor, and extract their data.

Registration is free to all students, faculty and staff at the University of Waterloo.

In this one-day workshop, drawing on Dr. Sarah Wilkins-Laflamme’s 10 years of experience running national and international surveys, we will review the key steps in developing high-quality survey questions and questionnaires along with tips for achieving precise, relevant and accessible measures when collecting survey data via smartphone, tablet, computer, in-person interview, telephone interview, and mail. 

The workshop will be held in DC 1568. Registration is free for all students, faculty and staff at the University of Waterloo.

This workshop will provide participants with an introduction to simple and multiple linear regression. Topics covered in this workshop include the regression models, model assumptions, interpretation of coefficients, significance testing, interactions between variables and the use and interpretation of dummy variables. Model checking methods such as residual plots and collinearity diagnostics will also be covered. Several methods for model selection will be included.

Registration is free and open to all University of Waterloo faculty, staff and graduate students.

This workshop will provide participants with an introduction to Poisson regression used to model counts observed in a period of time. Topics covered in this workshop includes the Poisson regression model, model assumptions, interpretation of coefficients, significance testing, interactions between variables and the use and interpretation of dummy variables. Model checking methods such as residual plots and goodness-of-fit tests will also be covered. Several methods for model selection will be included.

Registration is free and open to all University of Waterloo faculty, staff and graduate students.

This workshop will show participants how to estimate and make inferences about a binary response probability and related quantities through logistic regression. Topics covered in this workshop includes the logistic regression model, model assumptions, interpretation of coefficients, significance testing, interactions between variables and the use and interpretation of dummy variables. Model checking methods such as residual plots and goodness-of-fit tests will also be covered. Several methods for model selection will be included.

Registration is free and open to all University of Waterloo faculty, staff and graduate students.

In this introduction to R workshop, participants will be taught the basics of this open source language. Topics covered in this workshop includes:

  • Help tools
  • Importing / exporting data
  • Data management
  • Descriptive and exploratory statistics
  • Graphics
  • Common statistical analyses

Registration is free and open to all University of Waterloo faculty, staff, graduate and undergraduate students. No programming experience is assumed

Feature selection is the process of selecting a subset of relevant features (commonly known as predictors or independent variables) for model construction. Performing feature selection allows researchers to identify irrelevant data, improve the interpretation and increase predictive accuracy of learned models. A feature selection algorithm can be seen as the combination of a search technique for proposing new feature subsets, along with an evaluation which scores the different feature subsets. The choice of evaluation measure heavily influences the algorithm. There are three main categories of feature selection algorithms: wrappers, filters and embedded methods. In this seminar, we will introduce some basic feature selection methods such as score-based feature ranking, stepwise subset selection and LASSO regression.

Registration is free and open to all University of Waterloo faculty, staff, graduate and undergraduate students. The primary software we will discussed in this seminar is RStudio. There is no hands-on work in this seminar.

Many categorical response variables have a natural order to their levels. We refer to them as ordinal variable (data). This workshop will show participants how to estimate and make inferences about ordinal data through the proportional odds model. Topics covered in this workshop includes introducing the proportional odds model, discussing the model assumptions, interpretation of coefficients, significance testing, interactions between variables and the use and interpretation of dummy variables. Model checking methods such as residual plots and goodness-of-fit tests will also be covered. Several methods for model selection will be included.

Registration is free and open to all University of Waterloo faculty, staff, graduate and undergraduate students. The primary software we will discuss in this seminar is RStudio. There is no hands-on work in this seminar.

Though the workshop will not go into mathematical details and proofs, it will provide some reasoning and intuition behind the key formulas used in survey sampling. It will also look at various examples using the statistical software SAS (free to students, faculty and staff at the University of Waterloo). In addition to illustrating basic data analysis techniques, those examples aim to provide guidance on some of the pitfalls of analysing survey data. Part 3 is a practical hands-on opportunity for participants to conduct basic data analysis using SAS on their own laptop.

This is two-day workshop will be held in M3 3127. Registration is free for all members of the university.