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This interactive online MSD Skills training course is aimed at MSD postgraduate research students and staff with some programming experience in R who want to expand their skills in order to create reproducible analysis workflows and publication quality figures from biological data. In order to register to this course you are required to complete a short pre-course quiz on Canvas using your SSO login (the link is provide in the text below).

Which course is for me?

MSD Skills runs several courses in statistics that have similar titles to this course. Here is a short description of this course vs other available courses to help you decide if you should sign up:

Fundamentals of statistical software and analysis (FoSSA): Runs ONLINE, at your own pace. Gives a brief overview of statistical theory and how to carry out a wide variety of statistical tests in R, Stata, or SPSS. 

Introduction to Statistics: Runs in person over 4 days. Gives an in-depth understanding of fundamental statistical theory. Does not use any software. Students may want to take this course prior to signing up for FoSSA.

Intro to R for Biologists: Runs online over 2 days. Gives a more in-depth understanding to use the software R and make basic plots. Covers some basic statistical tests. You could take this course before or after taking FoSSA; FoSSA will show you how to run a wider variety of statistical tests in R.

Data analysis & visualisation in R for biologists (this course): Runs online over 3 days. This is a more advanced course covering programming, data wrangling and visualisation in R. It does not cover statistical tests but shows how statistical information can be visualised in plots.

COURSE AIM FOR DATA ANALYSIS & VISUALISATION IN R FOR BIOLOGISTS

You are required to attend 3 sessions:

  • Monday 11 November, 13:30 - 16:30
  • Monday 18 November, 13:30 - 16:30
  • Wednesday 20 November, 13:30 - 16.30

In order to register to this course you are required to complete a short pre-course quiz on Canvas using your SSO login. Please click on Canvas link. This quiz is intended to assess your knowledge of basic R concepts to make sure you are at the right level to attend this course. Upon the successful completion of the quiz you will redirected to the course registration page.

By the end of this module, you will be able to perform end-to-end analysis of your own data including statistics and advanced visualization using the third-party packages, which extend the functionality of the base R.

By the end of this course, you will learn:

how to find and install the third-party packages relevant for your analysis

how to perform advanced data wrangling

how to create your own functions

how to create graphs and figures for publication

how to visualise more complex data and relationships within the data

COURSE FORMAT

The course is structured into 3 half-day sessions as follows:

Session 1 - filtering, merging, grouping, aggregating data - Introduction to common packages such as dplyr and data.table

Session 2 – visualising data and statistical information with ggplot2 and its extensions

Session 3 – advanced visualization and plots for high-dimensional data (heatmaps, PCA), interactive plots with Shiny/Plotly

PARTICIPANT NUMBERS

25 

WHAT YOU WILL NEED

Software requirements:

•         R (version 4.0 or higher) which you can download using this link.

•         Rstudio (Desktop free version), which you can download, using this link: https://rstudio.com/products/rstudio/download/

Any installation questions could be addressed to courses@medsci.ox.ac.uk

Hardware requirements:

It is highly recommended to have an access to the microphone and ideally a second screen during the sessions.

ATTENDANCE CERTIFICATE ON SURVEY COMPLETION

In order to receive a certificate of attendance, participation in all three sessions is mandatory. Once you have completed the course, you will be sent an email with a link to the overall course feedback survey. When you have filled in and submitted the survey, you will be sent an email with a link to your attendance certificate. Survey results are downloaded and stored anonymously.