Exploratory Data Analysis in R

This workshop is built for researchers and graduate students who want to understand their data before modeling. Participants learn how to use R and the tidyverse to explore patterns, summarize key variables, check data structure, and generate quick diagnostic visuals that reveal outliers, missingness, and relationships worth investigating. The session walks through a real research dataset and focuses on practical steps: importing data, cleaning common issues, creating descriptive summaries, and producing clear exploratory plots.

The workshop has already been delivered in the Agricultural Economics department, where students worked hands-on in RStudio and left with a full script they could reuse for their own projects. The outcomes are straightforward but valuable: cleaner workflows, stronger intuition about the data, and a more reliable foundation for regression and visualization. Departments and labs can request this workshop and have it tailored to their datasets or research needs.