SuffolkEcon

SuffolkEcon is an experimental R package for the Department of Economics at Suffolk University to help teach introductory concepts in statistics, econometrics and optimization.

The website for the package, including examples, can be found here.

Installation

Currently the package is only available on GitHub. To install it, first install the remotes package:

install.packages('remotes')

Then you can install SuffolkEcon:

remotes::install_github('SuffolkEcon/SuffolkEcon')

and load it in an R script or an R notebook in the usual way:

library(SuffolkEcon)

Why this package?

The package is not meant to substitute for other packages in the R ecosystem that students will learn and use inside and outside of introductory courses.

Instead, SuffolkEcon aims to make a more marginal contribution to teaching basic concepts and reducing handoff frictions between classes by providing some one-line routines to do things like:

  • run “what-if” experiments using real data (e.g., bootstrapping sample statistics or linear models)
  • plotting distributions and probabilities, and
  • plotting user-defined functions and their derivatives, roots and optima.

In the spirit of fitting into the greater package network, SuffolkEcon is built with tidyverse principles and is meant to be loaded alongside the tidyverse (SuffolkEcon imports dplyr, ggplot, stringr and rlang). All SuffolkEcon functions return either data.frame or ggplot objects.

Contributing

This package is very much a work in progress, so contributions and bug reports are welcome. Drop us a line at ldegeest [at] suffolk [dot] edu.

Acknowledgements

This package was funded by a grant from the Center for Teaching and Scholarly Excellence at Suffolk University.

License

The source code of this package is licensed under the MIT License.