PS 590 --- Winter 2007

This is the website for PS 590, which is an iTV course introducing the potential outcomes approach to causal inference and some related methodologies (such as matching and propensity scores) to graduate students in Political Science and related disciplines.

Syllabus here.

I will almost certainly be adjusting the syllabus as we go along. I'll be announcing changes to the syllabus in class.

Announcements

Examples and Handouts that I've worked out including Sweave files to recreate the analyses. The PDF files in this directory show all of the results of the analysis. The files that end with .Rnw include both R code and LaTeX source to create the .pdf file (after running Sweave("filename.Rnw") in R, and then processing the resulting .tex file with pdflatex. Right now the .txt files are datafiles.

Readings that are not in the two required textbooks and which are not easily available via Google Scholar.

Assignments .

Handouts

You can find the handouts (both the sources and the pdf versions) here .

Links on Scientific Computing

Learning to Compute and Collaborate Effectively

Gregory Wilson has a great online course on this topic.

Learning R

• The R manuals and help pages are here
• Robert Anderson's ICPSR course page with great lectures using R is here
• Julian Faraway's great book on using R is here
• Mahmood Arai's "Brief Guide to R for Beginners in Econometrics" here
• UCLA has a very nice set of notes and links here

Learning LaTeX

• For a basic book to get started:
  Helmut Kopka and Patrick Daly. 2004. Guide to LaTeX, Fourth Edition.
• For a more advanced reference guide:
  Frank Mittelbach, Michel Goossens, Johannes Braams, David Carlisle, Chris Rowley. 2004. LaTeX Companion, Second Edition.

Readings and Supplementary Materials