Explore Statistics with R
Learn statistics in a practical, experimental way, through statistical programming with R, using examples from the health sciences. We will take you on a journey from basic concepts of statistics to examples from the health science research frontier.
Register for Explore Statistics with R from Karolinska Institutet at http://edx.org/courses.
About this Course
Do you want to learn how to harvest health science data from the internet? Do you want to understand the world through data analysis? Start by exploring statistics with R!
Skilled persons who can process and analyze data are in great demand today. In this course you will explore concepts in statistics that help you make sense out of data. You will learn the practical skills necessary to find, import, analyze and visualize data. We will take a look under the hood of statistics and equip you with broad tools for understanding statistical inference and statistical methods. You will also get to perform some really complicated calculations and visualizations, following in the footsteps of Karolinska Institutet’s researchers.
You are probably reading this course description because you know that statistics and statistical programming are essential skills in our golden age of data abundance. Let’s say it again: Health science has become a field of big data, just like so many other fields of study. New techniques make it possible and affordable to generate massive data sets in biology. Researchers and clinicians can measure the activity for each of 30000 genes of a patient. They can read the complete genome sequence of a patient. Thanks to another trend of the decade, open access publishing, the results of such large scale health science are very often published for you to read free of charge. You can even access the raw data from open databases such as the gene expression database of the NCBI, National Center for Biotechnology Information.
In this course you will learn the basics of R, a powerful open source statistical programming language. Why has R become the tool of choice in bioinformatics, the health sciences and many other fields? One reason is surely that it’s powerful and that you can download it for free right now. But more importantly, it’s supported by an active user community. In this course you will learn how to use peer reviewed packages for solving problems at the frontline of health science research. Commercial actors just can’t keep up implementing the latest algorithms and methods. When algorithms are first published, they are already implemented in R. Join us in a gold digging expedition. Explore statistics with R.