Homework 1

This is the repository for Homework 1 for BEE 4850.

Learning Objectives

After completing this lab, students will be able to:

• identify spurious correlations;
• simulate from data-generating models corresponding to hypotheses about data;
• reason about the consistency of data with hypotheses about data generating processes.

Repository Overview

The repository consists of the following files:

• hw01.ipynb: Jupyter Notebook for the homework assignment. Students should create code or Markdown blocks as necessary to answer questions, or can write their code and solutions in a different file format.
• Project.toml, Manifest.toml: Julia environment files. These should just work, but feel free to add other packages as needed using the Pkg package manager.
• hw01.qmd: Source file for Jupyter notebook generation. You could modify this file to write your solution if you want to use Quarto.
• LICENSE: This material is licensed using the MIT license. You can ignore this for working on the problem set.
• README.md: This file. You shouldn't need to touch this.
• .gitignore: This tells git what files to ignore. You shouldn't need to touch this.

Prerequisites

These are the prerequisites for using the Julia package environment and the notebook. If using a different language (in a modified version of the notebook or elsewhere), the steps will be different.

1. Install Julia before beginning this lab. This notebook was developed with version 1.10.4, but any 1.10.x should work (there could be some issues with other versions, depending on what's changed).
2. If necessary, install git and create a GitHub account.
3. Clone the repository. I recommend doing this in a dedicated BEE4850/ folder, which can also house homework assignment repositories and lecture notes. You can clone directly into the BEE4850/ folder. For Windows (or from another graphical interface), just create a BEE4850 folder, then a hw folder inside of that, then clone into that folder. Or to clone into a BEE4850/hw folder, from a command prompt:

   cd BEE4850/
   mkdir hw
   cd hw/
   git clone https://github.com/BEE4850/hw01.git

Opening The Notebook

1. To interact (view and run) the notebook, there are two options:

• Install an integrated development environment, or IDE (I recommend VS Code with the Julia extension).
• Use the IJulia.jl package. I've included this in the project environment (discussed below), so no further steps are needed.

2. Opening the notebook will depend on what you decided to do in the previous step.

• If you installed VS Code, you should be able to just open hw01.ipynb and everything should just work.
• If you're using a different IDE, Google how to make sure that it is set up to run a Julia notebook.
• If you want to use IJulia.jl, open a Julia prompt. You can do this by:

  • Using the Julia-1.10 or equivalent graphical program, type cd("BEE4850/hw") or whatever path points to your lab notebook folder;

  • Navigating to your BEE4850/hw/hw01 folder and typing julia to open the prompt.Then:

    import Pkg
    Pkg.activate(".")
    using IJulia
    notebook()

    and you can navigate to and open hw01.ipynb.