Acknowledgement of country
I would like to begin by acknowledging the traditional owners of the land on which we are meeting today, the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation, and pay my respects to their Elders past, present and emerging.
Workshop Structure
This is a 4-day workshop (SEP 08-11 2025) with each day running from 9am-12pm. During each day’s session, we will cover a new topic in the workflow pipeline.
Monday: Which statistical distribution to pick (Ben)
Tuesday: Continuous data models (Paul)
Wednesday: Discrete data models (Ben)
Thursday: More advanced models (Paul)
Except for Day 1, each session is structured to be mainly ‘talk-and-chalk’ for the first half and then more hands-on for the second half. Day 1 will be mostly ‘talk-and-chalk’, interspersed with some hands-on stuff.
** Notes **
We will not be offended if you just stay for the first half
Ask questions anytime. Most likely someone else will have the same question. We may defer the question to hands-on section if it is too much of rabbit-hole.
We will have a wide range of skills across the days
Most importantly, morning tea will be provided!! 😀
At the end of the workshop attendees should be able to:
- Select which distribution the data comes from
- Decide which statistical model is appropriate
- How to construct that model and run it in R
- Know how to interpret the model results
- Know what to present to their audience
What we are NOT trying to do
- Turn you into a R programmer in 4 days
- Make you cry 😢
What to expect
Approach
Compared to when we started providing biometrics workshops, the amount of resources and online learning tools has grown exponentially. In particular, AI has become an essential tool and will write R code for you (see Using AI ). An advantage of this new reality is that we can focus more on the concepts, de-emphasizing the R coding component of the workshop. Therefore, for those less familiar with R, the most important thing is understanding the concepts and try not to get bogged down by R coding. That being said, R is at the heart to the workshop and most things will be demonstrated using R.
Group projects
In this workshop, we’re using group projects as a way to make learning R and statistical modeling more manageable. Working in teams can also help spread out the coding load, so if you’re newer to R, you won’t feel stuck or overwhelmed. That being said, if you already have the R coding expertise, feel free to work on your own as well.
Course Website
Obviously, there is a course website. It is a blog-centric website and we will add each day’s lecture the morning of.
By the nature of this workshop, we have limited time and cannot go in-depth. Therefore, we have tried to distill out the key concepts/steps in the course notes, but there might be topics that need additional explanation and examples. If so, Paul and I are happy to write up a short-blurp about it and post it on the “Extra topics” in the upper right of website.
Previous workshop on analysis workflow
As we will use R in this workshop in Rstudio environment, it may be useful to remind yourself about Data analysis workflow in R
Plug for QEARI
Just a reminder QEARI (Quantitative Ecology ARI) is a great resource and a safe place for asking “dumb” questions. The amount of expertise among its regulars is impressive!
