Applied Regression Analysis

Applied regression courses are thin on the ground. And this course promises a follow up focusing on logistic regression. So despite misgivings about using Stata, the proprietary stats package the course uses (and provides a short term license for), I decided to give it a try.

Based on Prof Lemeshow's forum comments, the course is pitched at post-graduate level. I've seem regression before at this level, but my knowledge is extremely rusty (with a slight derust treatment applied in the form of Duke's excellent "Data Analysis and Statistical Inference" MOOC a few months back.)

I'm about half way through week 2 of this course, but "week 1" was mainly about installing Stata (more on that below). So these impressions are preliminary (in particular the 'easy' rating since obviously the first part is something of a stats review).

Installation on Stata on Linux was not straightforward, because the original instructions were 6 versions out of date. (Stata is on v13, the instructions were for v7!) Fortunately some better instructions including a critical workaround have now been posted on the forum. I hope these get adopted officially, because the debacle cost me several hours.

Prof Lemeshow says he teaches using Stata because it only takes a few hours to pick up. I'm yet to be convinced that it's significantly easier than R (in REPL mode). But I'm keeping an open mind.

The lectures are clearly recorded in class & lightly edited. Prof Lemeshow is a patient, good humoured teacher. But even this early on a glaring omission in the code shown during the lectures has made it impossible to follow along - without refering to the forum.

These kinds of rough edges, if repeated can be very time consuming and frustrating, leading to high drop out rates. Faced with more choices, I'd look elsewhere. But let's see if I can make it through the first week...
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EDIT: dropped. Maybe for someone who's recently followed on campus classes & has a textbook on hand, this would be doable. There's no doubt applied stats is hard to teach: because of a vast gap between the complex mathematical underpinnings & thumb in the air practice. But despite good intentions it's not being taught very effectively (in online format) here, at least not for my level of rustiness.