qBio I

Tuesday, August 27th, 2024 – Thursday, October 10th, 2024
Tuesdays and Thursdays, 5:30 PM – 7:30 PM (except where noted)
Location: LC-504

Course Directors:

Teaching Assistant:

Office Hours:

  • Mondays 5:30-6:30pm (LC-504, and Zoom)

This course will be fully graded: (Honors, High Pass, Low Pass, Fail)

Class Sessions and Lecture Notes

  1. Quantifying a Sample Distribution | Code
    Tuesday, 27 August, 2024

    summary statistics, SD vs. SEM, measurement variation vs. biological variation

  2. Introduction to R Part I | Code
    Thursday, 29 August, 2024

  3. Probability Density Functions and the Normal Distribution | Code
    Tuesday, 3 September, 2024

    binomial, Poisson, and normal distributions, testing for normality: an introduction to formal statistical tests, qqplots vs. formal tests

  4. Introduction to R Part II | Code | ablation.csv
    Thursday, 5 September, 2024

  5. Confidence Intervals and Contingency Tables | Code
    Tuesday, 10 September, 2024

    t-tests, working with proportional data, why CIs are more informative than p-values, study types (retrospective, prospective, and cross sectional), working with rare events

  6. p-Values and Formal Statistical Testing | Code
    Thursday, 12 September, 2024

    duality between p-values and CIs, statistical vs. biological significance, choosing an appropriate α, type I and type II errors

    Problem Set #1: Understanding Type I error rates

  7. Statistical Power and Experimental Design | Slides | Code
    Tuesday, 17 September, 2024

    why you cannot just add a few N to your dataset when p > 0.05, appreciating the economics (in time and money) of experimental design, statistical vs. biological significance revisited, designing experiments around hard-to-obtain samples

  8. Multiple Hypothesis Testing and Non-parametric Tests | Code
    Thursday, 19 September, 2024

    from Bonferroni to False Discovery Rate, dealing with non-normal data, t-tests re-visited

  9. Group project: the optimal stopping problem | Code
    Code quality | R style
    Tuesday, 24 September, 2024

  10. Bayesian Methods | Code
    Thursday, 26 September, 2024

    how to incorporate prior knowledge into statistical models

  11. Correlation vs. Linear Regression | Code
    Tuesday, 1 October, 2024

    introduction to modeling in R; why is not the whole story

  12. Fitting Model Parameters to Data | Code
    Thursday, 3 October, 2024

    non-linear regression, a statistical view of curve fitting, confidence intervals revisited

  13. Quantitative Comparison of Models and ANOVA | Code
    Tuesday, 8 October, 2024

    how to avoid over-fitting, F-test and AICs, F-tests as a means of parameter estimation

    Problem Set #3

  14. Graphics with ggplot2 | Rmd file
    ablation.csv
    Violin plots | Normal curves
    Data wrangling with tidyverse | Code
    Thursday, 10 October, 2024