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In the unlikely event that Statistical Horizons LLC must cancel a seminar, we will do our best to inform you as soon as possible of the cancellation. You would then have the option of receiving a full refund of the seminar fee or a credit towards another seminar. In no event shall Statistical Horizons LLC be liable for any incidental or consequential damages that you may incur because of the cancellation.

A 4-Day Livestream Seminar Taught by Adam D. Rennhoff, Ph.D.

Solid statistical analysis, on its own, is no longer sufficient. Providing key decision-makers with the information and analysis they need often requires presenting complex concepts in a visually appealing way. Interactive dashboards are a great way to accomplish this. Interactive dashboards allow users to select and adjust parameters to generate customized output. Fortunately, creating professional-looking interactive dashboards does not require an expensive software subscription. In this course, we will use the open-source Shiny package for R to create and deploy interactive dashboards.

The purpose of this course is to guide you through the process of creating an interactive dashboard – using exclusively open-source software (R) – and then deploying it online.

While the instructor will provide lecture notes and sample R code, this is a hands-on course. Getting the most out of this course requires that you “do,” not just “watch.” Through the seminar content and take-home exercises, you will build and then deploy an interactive Shiny dashboard. We will begin simply, incorporating more complexity into our dashboard as we introduce new concepts. By the end of the course, you will have a template and the experience necessary to build your own “real-world” dashboards.

The course begins with a brief review of the plotting capabilities in R’s ggplot2 package. Interactive dashboards are all about visualization and ggplot2, which is part of the tidyverse of integrated data science packages for R, the most widely used graphics package.

After reviewing ggplot2, we start with a simple (non-interactive) dashboard using the flexdashboard package. This package allows users to create appealing dashboards in the R Markdown environment. Students with prior experience creating R Markdown documents will find the transition to flexdashboards to be intuitive. We will explore different dashboard layouts and how you can customize them. You will use your experience with ggplot2 to fill your own dashboards with appealing visualizations.

The simple flexdashboards, while useful in presenting static information, are not truly interactive. The course moves on to R Shiny which provides an opportunity to create interactive dashboards. You will be introduced to both Shiny’s “back end” operations, such as loading or requesting data and performing data manipulations, and Shiny’s “front end” user interface settings. The result is a fully customizable dashboard that adapts as users interact with the data.

Dashboards are less useful unless others can view them (this can be a downside of alternative dashboard options which, for example, might make it impossible to share a dashboard outside of your company). So the final part of the course will show you how you to deploy your dashboard online, enabling you to share with people far and wide. The course will focus on free methods to deploy these interactive dashboards, although there are certainly paid methods as well, such as Amazon Web Services.