Practical Econometrics & Data Science

Book 0: Prerequisites

Preface

These notes cover a number of topics which are prerequisite to the main notes on Practical Econometrics & Data Science. Familiarity with these topics ensures that you’re able to follow along the main text and have the necessary software on hand.

At the very least, the chapters on Software setup and Programming basics should be reviewed to ensure that you’re able to follow along with the code examples given in the main notes.

Currently, code examples are provided in R and Python, with a possible addition of Julia sometime in the future.

Chapter overview

The material is categorized into the following chapters:

• The Software setup chapter presents two methods of software installation. The reader can choose whether they want to install R and Python directly on their PC, or create a container, following the outlined steps (recommended).

• The Software overview chapter gives a brief outline on RStudio, JupyterLab and Visual Studio Code (vscode if installing directly on your computer, or code-server if in a container).

• The Programming basics chapter covers the basics of R and Python. It also presents a short map of similar libraries and functions between the two programming languages. In addition to this, a basic overview of the linux command line is also presented.

Additional info

These notes are rendered with Quarto, which makes it easy to render reproducible code and incorporate its output alongside text, formulas and charts.