Online live course: Data Exploration, Regression, GLM & GAM. With an introduction to R. 1-5 March 2027.

This is a live online course
Teaching times: 14:00 - 20:00 UK time

This (live) online course consists of 5 modules representing a total of approximately 40 hours of work. Each module consists of live teaching, followed by exercises using real data sets. All the material is also available as video files. All video files are on-demand and can be watched online, as often as you want, at any time of the day, within a 12-month period. A discussion board allows for daily interaction between instructors and participants.

You are invited to apply the statistical techniques discussed during the course on your own data and if you encounter any problems, you can ask questions on the Discussion Board. The course includes a 1-hour face-to-face video chat with the instructors.

Course content
We begin with an introduction to R and provide a protocol for data exploration to avoid common statistical problems. We will discuss how to detect outliers, deal with collinearity and transformations.

An important statistical tool is multiple linear regression. Various basic linear regression topics will be explained from a biological point of view. We will discuss potential problems and show how generalised linear models (GLM) can be used to analyse count data, presence-absence data and proportional data. Sometimes, parametric models (linear regression, GLM) do not quite fit the data and in such cases generalised additive models (GAM; a smoothing technique) can be used.

For more information, see the course flyer: Flyer2027_03RGG_Online.pdf