by Keith McNulty
🗓️ October 23, 2025
⏰ 08:30 - 12:00
🏨 King Room, Loews Atlanta
📖 keithmcnulty/siop-lec-workshop-2025
This course covers some of the most commonly used methods of explanatory modeling and inference when working with data related to people. Among other things, you will learn about:
- Typical explanatory analyses conducted on people data
- Common people-related data types
- Common hypothesis testing methods
- Common explanatory modeling methods
You will learn by working through code and data examples, and you'll be given follow up resources and a take home project to put your learning into practice.
To be able to:
- Understand basic principles of statistical inference and know how to conduct tests of difference in populations based on samples
- Understand how to conduct and interpret a suite of explanatory modeling techniques which are used to analyze common outcome types in people analytics (continuous, binary, ordinal, time-dependent)
- Use integrated data science documents to execute analyses and explain methods and results based on all the above.
- Watch this short video I made, which will guide you through the workshop materials and the process of setting up and using Posit Cloud, a cloud-based version of RStudio. This is the platform we will be using for coding exercises during the workshop.
- Use this invite link to access the course exercises on Posit Cloud which we will go through during the workshop.
- Optional - If you are not a regular R user: Review the module on R fundamentals or read this book chapter to ensure that you have a basic familiarity with how R works. If you have time, go into the Posit Cloud workspace, open the module on R fundamentals, and try to complete the exercises in that module. Solutions are provided via the links in the agenda. The less time we need to spend on fundamentals in this workshop, the more time we can spend on learning how to model. Note that exercises marked 'EXTENSION' are not essential and are intended for individuals with existing R fluency.
| Time | Activity |
|---|---|
| 08:30 - 09:15 | Preliminaries |
| - Welcome and intros | |
| - Review of R fundamentals (Assignment Solutions) | |
| 09:15 - 10:30 | Statistical Inference and Linear Regression |
| - Statistical inference and hypothesis testing (Assignment Solutions) | |
| - Linear regression (Assignment Solutions) | |
| 10:30 - 10:45 | Coffee break |
| 10:45 - 11:45 | Binomial and Ordinal Logistic Regression |
| - Binomial logistic regression (Assignment Solutions) | |
| - Ordinal regression (Assignment Solutions) | |
| 11:45 - 12:00 | Follow up and closing |
| - Additional resources on advanced methods | |
| - Assignment Solutions | |
| - Optional take home project |
Keith McNulty is a psychometrician and applied mathematician and is a leading technical expert and author in the field of people analytics. He is the author of Handbook of Regression Modeling in People Analytics, on which this course is based.
