IBSTATB16

Introductory Biostatistics for Biologists

   IMPORTANT DATES for this Course
   Deadline for applications: Nov 7th 2016
   Course dates: Nov 14th - Nov 18th 2016

Candidates with adequate profile will be accepted in the next 72 hours after the application, until we reach 20 participants.

Course description

This is one of our "Foundations" type courses, providing a systematic and detailed review of fundamental concepts and techniques in Biostatistics. Participants can expect to go through a set of exercises that are based on biomedical problems. These exercises are preceded by short lectures that are simple to follow. The lectures are designed to provide the conceptual framework that is needed to release the training power of the exercises, not to flood the participants with formality, which will be kept to a minimum. We will make use of a highly interactive methodology, taking advantage of our well equipped Bioinformatics training room. With this approach, we expect to bring the participants to a high degree of usage independence in using the methods that we cover.
Main topics: Descriptive Statistics; Probability; Statistical Inference; Design of Experiments.
See the Detailed Program .

Target Audience

Most participants must have had one or more semester courses in Statistics in their graduate education. For some, learning Statistics has happened a long time ago, and that makes it difficult to go back and manipulate the concepts with full confidence. For others, school days were just a while ago, but using that knowledge represents a serious effort.
Opening a Statistics handbook, when you want to use Statistics righ away, is usually a painful experience, as concepts often show a less than obvious interdependence. Attending this course is a chance of revisiting those subjects in a systematic way, through a series of hands-on exercises, in a workflow that brings-in the skills in a seamless way.

Course Pre-requisites

Basic knowledge in Statistics is handy.
Elementary skills in computer usage are needed.
Basic Familiarity with the R environment will be necessary. Please follow the exercise that we provide. Install R from http://cran.r-project.org/ following the instructions. Download and unzip the Tutorial folder that is made available here.
Then:
- Visualize the slides in "Tutorial R.pdf"
- Follow the exercise in "Basic_Exercise.pdf"
- For reference, we also provide a script with a correct set of R statements in sequence "Tutorial_script.R"

Note: the dataset required in step17 is no longer available for download from the specified source; therefore, it is provided in the zipped folder of this tutorial.

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