During the summer of 2018, I worked with St. Olaf Professor Paul Roback to enhance the textbook Beyond Multiple Linear Regression: Applied Generalized Linear Models and Multilevel Models in R (Authored by Professors Paul Roback and Julie Legler). The textbook is free, open-source, and encourages hands-on learning. All code used for data analysis is included in the text, and all data used is available on the book’s GitHub.
I spent most of my summer working on Chapters 3 and 7. Prior to my work, Chapter 3 (“Distribution Theory”) was essentially empty with only a table of contents and a “Coming Soon” message. My largest task was to transform that skeleton into a full chapter with descriptions of distributions, examples highlighting their uses, and connections to statistical modeling.
Chapter 7 (“Correlated Data”), introduces the reader to correlated data structures to motivate multilevel modeling (which is introduced in the following chapter, and is the focus of the later half of the book). The chapter originally existed as a set of guided exercises for the reader. I worked on transforming the chapter to better match the style of the rest of the text.
