Course Overview: This course will provide an introduction to working with real-life data typical of those encountered in the field of psychology. The course will be delivered by Dr. Dale Barr and Dr. Luc Bussière, who are practicing academics in the fields of psychology and evolutionary biology respectively, with many years of expertise with R and statistical modelling as both scientists and instructors.  This five-day course will consist of series of modules (each lasting roughly half a day) covering topics including the…

Course Overview: This workshop will provide attendees with the opportunity to learn how to use machine learning to analyze data coming from diverse data domains and scientific disciplines and without necessarily prior knowledge of the scientific discipline where the data are coming from. Attendees will learn how to use R and several R packages including classification and regression trees, ensembles and bagging, random forests, neural networks, and boosting (learning from mistakes). These techniques will be used for data classification, determining…

Course Overview: This five-day course workshop aims to provide a hands-on introduction to the statistical software package R, with the aim of enabling interested researchers to transition to using R instead of existing software packages (such as SPSS). R is a very powerful tool that allows you to perform almost any analysis imaginable, easily grapple with the messiest data, and produce beautiful plots and reports. Because using R involves coding (there is no point-and-click interface), it can take some effort…

Course Overview: This course will provide attendees with the opportunity to learn how (a) to understand and read modern statistics reported in scientific studies, (b) use basic modern statistics for analysing their own data, using the open access R statistical software. The course will focus more on data deriving from life sciences namely medicine, biology, and ecology. The course will initially revise basic statistical knowledge of what is a sample and a distribution, and what is hypothesis testing. Sequentially, attendees…

Course Overview: This course will cover introductory hierarchical modelling for real-world data sets from a Bayesian perspective. These methods lie at the forefront of statistics research and are a vital tool in the scientist’s toolbox. The course focuses on introducing concepts and demonstrating good practice in hierarchical models. All methods are demonstrated with data sets which participants can run themselves. Participants will be taught how to fit hierarchical models using the Bayesian modelling software Jags and Stan through the R…