Course Terminology

Note

We’ll keep this page updated as we come across new technical and statistical terms for easy reference

Term	Definition
rstudio	An IDE originally designed to work with R, but also works well with Quarto documents. Also includes a Terminal separate from the R console for running shell commands.
quarto-doc	.qmd files that contain a mix of prose (markdown) and code-chunks (Python/R) that you can preview and render with Quarto. By default quarto will always rerun ALL code-chunks in the file upon saving.
github	A online cloud-based service for synchronize local git repositories with REMOTE repositories on github.com. This faciliates collaborative works flows and open-source development. We’re using the Github Classroom feature built-up on this for our course.
python-notebook	.py files that we can work with interactively using code-cells and markdown-cells (similar to quarto chunks). A much richer interface for interactively working with pieces of code one-at-a-time
vscode	An extremely popular general purpose IDE that supports multiple language (e.g. Python, R, Javascript) and makes use of extensions to add additional functionality (e.g. quarto rendering, Python notebooks).
estimator	A rule for aggregating data (e.g. mean) under a set of assumptions defined by a loss-function (e.g. SSE)
environment	Really just a hidden folder on your computer (typically .venv/) that contains an isolated Python installation with all additional libraries and tools. uv handles this all for us!
command-line-program	A program that you interact with exclusively from your terminal; often abbreviated as CLI
central-limit-theorem	The sampling distribution of an estimator converges to a normal (gaussian) distribution even if the underlying samples are not normally distributed.
homebrew	A command-line package manager for macOS that lets you install packages and applications using the brew command
terminal	An application for controlling your computer via commands that you type in (e.g. cd, ls) instead of point-and-click
shell	A program that runs automatically when your Terminal starts and interprets the commands you type to control your computer instead of pointing-and-clicking. FYI: the default shell on macOS is zsh not bash.
github-userid	Your user “handle” on github.com that identifies you when using git commands (local) and interacting with Github.com (remote). E.g. Eshin’s is @ejolly
quarto	a scientific publishing tool that allows you to mix prose and code-cells to render executable documents in a variety of formats (website, PDF, etc)
law-of-large-numbers	An estimator stabilizes to a true theoretical value (population statistic) as we aggregate more independent observations.
no-free-lunch-theorem	Any estimator that performs well somewhere, must perform poorly elsewhere.
loss-function	Quantifies the disparity between an estimator and observations (e.g squared vs absolue errors).
ide	Integrated-development-environment; a program that includes a code-editor, terminal/console, and other helpful features to be a “one-stop-shop” for most of your needs
uv	A library and environment manager for Python making it easy to create/add/update additional Python libraries & tools in a reproducible and isolated way. using a pyproject.toml “blueprints” file
git	A CLI to version control LOCAL files and folders called repositories. See the git guide for more details and a command cheatsheet.
marimo	A program like Quarto that can render .py files as interactive Python notebooks with code cells. FYI: marimo is the modern alternative to Jupyter notebooks which you may have heard of/used in the past.