«Réussir son programme doctoral» Workshops

This workshop presents high-quality survey and administrative micro-data, available from Statistics Canada and l'Institut de la statistique du Québec through the Centre interuniversitaire de la statistique sociale du Québec (CIQSS).

These two types of data are accessible through a secure research data centre (RDC) from the Université de Montréal and include confidential and detailed micro-data from over 80 surveys on households and demography, from census master files, commercial data and an increasing quantity of administrative data.

In order to help you choose relevant data for your research, public-use data from Statistics Canada and secured data from the RDC will be examined.

The workshop will look at problems concerning research and data access requests as well as available support to help you analyze your data.

The workshop begins by explaining the role of data preparation in the analysis process and presents the LACED's infrastructure for computing, preparing and analyzing data.

A description of the different financial databases available to the students, researchers and professors via the LACED and the HEC Montréal Library follows. This section is completed by a presentation of the services available to the library's different user categories for the data preparation and analysis, notably workshops and individual support.

There is also a demo on account creation and data extraction on the WRDS platform. Finally, there is a discussion on how to comply to the terms of use of the different licenses for educational and research purposes, from data extraction to the publication of results.

This hands-on workshop is for students who wish to improve their documentary research skills.

Participants will work on a topic of their choice by preparing a concept plan and applying search techniques in a few databases such as Web of Science, ABI Inform Complete and Google Scholar. Some library services will also be presented.

Although data manipulation (tidying and transforming) is best accomplished via code (with statistical analysis software like SAS, R and Python), spreadsheets are overwhelmingly used for academic teaching and prominent academic works and data management.

This workshop assumes a working knowledge of MS Office Excel. Initial topics include a quick review of intermediate level features and tools of Excel for data wrangling:  properties of List range and Tables, sorting and filtering, Pivot Tables and popular functions like VLOOKUP, RANK, and MATCH. The review will also cover the use of common text functions (CONCATENATE, UPPER, LOWER, PROPER, TRIM) to clean data, as well as date formats.

Issues related to data organization in spreadsheets are then presented. We’ll show how these MS Excel tools can be applied to untidy data according to the tidy data principle of Wickam, which is becoming more and more popular in data science. Time will also be devoted to data organization steps to take in order to protect the integrity of the data, ease analyses and avoid mistakes.

The workshop will first walk the participant through the cleaning of raw bank data from the Orbis Bank Focus database. A worked example with SAS code and macros is provided and the syntax explained. Participants will have the opportunity to run the proposed code chunks in the Lab.

The second part of the workshop will be devoted to how to process untidy data according to the tidy data principle of Wickam, which is becoming more and more popular in data science.

The session will also feature how one can in some cases avoid challenging coding in a SAS if the assignment at hand is related to exploratory or early stages of a research project, so that a quick solution with Excel is more suitable. Participants are expected to have basic skills in SAS programming.

Create a database of your bibliographic references by using the EndNote bibliography management software.

This workshop will help you to:

• organize your references;
• build bibliographies;
• attach PDF files to your databases;
• insert citations in your Word documents using the numerous bibliography styles, and much more.
   

Learn everything you need to become proficient with the LaTeX document preparation system. Discover the dissertations and theses templates specifically built for HEC Montréal!

Two workshops are offered :

• The Basics
• Advanced Notions
   

This five-week workshop is for students who wish to improve their academic writing skills in English. To be allowed to attend the workshop, students must agree to do a writing project connected to the research that they are currently conducting in their field of study.

This project, which they will complete over the course of the five week term, will consist in writing a section of text that they can incorporate either into their thesis or into an acamedic article intended for publication.

Each week, the participants will submit between two and three pages of this section of text, which the instructor will revise by providing detailed corrections and commentary, not only to indicate the errors in grammar and syntax, but also to specify the best way to avoid these errors and improve the overall quality of the writing. The weekly workshop sessions will be two hours long, and they will have two main parts:

• A preliminary theoretical presentation during which the instructor will explain fundamental concepts in grammar and syntax related to academic writing in English;
• A text revision practicum during which, under the supervision of the instructor, the participants will do academic writing exercises bases on the texts that they have submitted for their writing projects.

Contents:

1. Functions
   1. Function properties: lexical scoping and embedded environments principles
   2. Creating your own functions
   3. Functions calling functions and functions as function arguments
2. Loops
   1. Control structures: for, while, repeat
   2. Vectorized loops: *apply functions
3. Debugging

Contents:

1. The ggplot2 library
   1. Overview of library options
   2. Graphics syntax
   3. Data layout
2. Creating reports and presentations
   1. Rmarkdown language
   2. Creating slides with Beamer and knitR
   3. R source code integration in LaTeX documents

  Prerequisites

Participants must have a basic knowledge of R.