About Assignments

Most of the homework assignments require you to write code or carry out a set of calculation using R or Python. Your code and calculations should be prepared as literate programming documents to be processed by Sweave or Pweave.

Due dates

IMPORTANT: Unless otherwise stated, assignments are due before the start of the next class session. Late submissions will receive zero credit.

Guidelines

When submitting your homework please follow these guidelines:

• In general, you should submit only two files each week -- a single Sweave file with all the R assignments and single Pweave files with any Python assignments. I do not need the generated LaTeX or PDF files -- I'll generate those on my end. Also, do not submit any standard data sets that I provide for the assignment or that are packaged as part of R.
• Name your files with the following convention: <lastname>-<firstinitial>-<handsonweek>.Rnw for Sweave documents and .Pnw for Pweave documents. For example, for the assignments corresponding to Hands-on 2, my Sweave file would be: magwene-p-2.Rnw
• If the assignment requires accessory functions, embed those functions in the Sweave/Pweave document.
• Except where explicitly required to do so, avoid calls that will print out long tables and data sets. For example, I don't need to see the entire iris data set printed out in every R assignments that uses it.
• Test your Sweave/Pweave documents in a fresh directory (see below) before turning in your assignments

Testing your Sweave/Pweave code

When I receive your assignment I will:

1. process your documents using Sweave/Pweave
2. Create PDF reports of successfully processed documents using pdflatex
3. Check your code and calculations for correctness

If I'm unable to carry out steps 1 and 2 with the code you submit, I will return the document and ask you to fix any errors before I proceed to step 3. To minimize the instances in which the Sweave/Pweave document seems to compile fine on your computer, but not on mine please take the following steps to test your code before submitting any homeworks:

1. Create an empty directory (e.g. ~/test)
2. Copy your Sweave/Pweave file to that directory
3. Copy any data sets that your code needs to that directory
4. For R:

• start a fresh R session and make sure your workspace is cleared by issuing this command: remove(list = ls(all = TRUE))
• Sweave your document
• If it compiles fine and you're able to create a PDF with the correct output then it highly likely it will work fine on my machine

5. For Python, test:

• Navigate to the directory
• From the command prompt, confirm you can process the files with the command: Pweave -ftex filename (or Pweave.py -ftex filename on Windows)
• Check the PDF for correctness as above