qBio I

Tuesday, September 12th, 2023 – Thursday, October 19th, 2023
Tuesdays and Thursdays, 5:30 PM – 7:30 PM (except where noted)
Location: LC-504

Course Directors:

Teaching Assistant:

Office Hours:

  • Wednesdays, 7-8pm (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, 12 September, 2023

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

  2. Probability Density Functions and the Normal Distribution | Code
    Thursday, 14 September, 2023

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

  3. Confidence Intervals and Contingency Tables | Code
    R Markdown | Rmd file | HTML file
    Tuesday, 19 September, 2023

    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

  4. p-Values and Formal Statistical Testing | Code
    Thursday, 21 September, 2023

    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
    Optional resources: Intro to R | Code

  5. Statistical Power and Experimental Design | Code
    Tuesday, 26 September, 2023

    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

  6. Multiple Hypothesis Testing and Non-parametric Tests | Code
    Thursday, 28 September, 2023

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

  7. Group project: the optimal stopping problem | Code
    Code quality | R style
    Tuesday, 3 October, 2023

  8. Bayesian Methods | Code
    Thursday, 5 October, 2023

    how to incorporate prior knowledge into statistical models

  9. Correlation vs. Linear Regression | Code
    Tuesday, 10 October, 2023

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

  10. Fitting Model Parameters to Data | Code
    Thursday, 12 October, 2023

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

  11. Quantitative Comparison of Models and ANOVA | Code
    Tuesday, 17 October, 2023

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

    Problem Set #3

  12. Graphics with ggplot2 | Rmd file
    ablation.csv
    Data wrangling with tidyverse | Code
    Thursday, 19 October, 2023