FAQs

1. General

Do I need to know how to use R in order to participate?

Yes. While we will guide you through the process of running a Bayesian analysis with a lot of examples, we won’t go over the basics of R.

If you wish to brush up your R skills, we recommend the interactive tool swiRl, which you can find here: http://swirlstats.com/.

Do I need to know basic statistics in order to participate?

Yes. We will give you the necessary notions to understand and perform a Bayesian analysis, and we will revise a few concepts from non-Bayesian statistics, but we expect you to have familiarity with linear regressions.

In particular, we won’t cover topics such as interpreting regression coefficients, understanding interactions, including random effects, or coding factors.

For an easy-to-follow introduction, we highly recommend Bodo Winter’s book Statistics for linguists: An introduction using R (which also includes a chapter on basic R).

2. Practicalities

I live in an inconvenient time-zone. Will I be able to attend at a different time?

We are sorry we could not accommodate all time-zones, but we will provide you with captioned recordings so that you can watch them and follow along.

We will record the live sessions and send a link to download the recordings to all registrants one or two days after each of the first two days. (We won’t records the third day, since it will be 1:1 meetings).

3. Software

The following might work (but no guarantee). Open the Terminal and run the following code.

sudo rm -rf /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools
sudo rm -rf /usr/local/include
xcode-select --install

If you have recently updated macOS, you have to update the CLTs and the easiest way to do it is to run in the Terminal:

sudo rm -rf /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools
xcode-select --install

On Linux/Ubuntu I get dependency issues when installing Rstan.

Some users reported this solution to have worked. Also using rrutter 4.0 instead of rrutter 3.5 seems to help.