Data Analysis in Biology

The course aims to provide the basic knowledge and train necessary skills in collecting, processing and presenting scientific data biological studies. The lectures of the course cover the broad range of topics from the introduction to planning experiments to the general framework of statistical hypothesis testing and presentation of results. Seminars are focused on data analysis in biology and implementation of the main statistical methods using free software (R language and environment). The seminars include the following sections: the introduction to R; the descriptive statistics; the basic graphical tools; analysis of outliers and checking distribution; comparing two samples and correlation; comparing multiple samples, simple linear regression and analysis of variance (ANOVA). The main aim of seminars is to learn how to apply statistical methods in practice for analyzing data in biological research with descriptive statistics, graphs and basic statistical tests using free software. This course provides students with an understanding of basic statistical concepts critical to the proper use and understanding of statistics in biological research and prepares students for the work on their master thesis. The practical part of the course introduces statistical computing language R and provides the experience in using R. After taking the course, the student will have the basic theoretical knowledge of modern statistical methods commonly needed in biology. The student will have basic skills to apply these methods to data using the programming language R. The student will be able to report the used statistical methods and the obtained results following the principles of scientific writing.