First Steps with R in Life Sciences

Overview

R is a complete, flexible and open source system for statistical analysis and graphics, which has become a tool of choice for biologists and biomedical scientists who need to analyse and visualise large amounts of data. Due to its popularity, R is continuously updated and extended with the latest libraries for data manipulation, modelling and visualisation.

This course will give an introduction to R and Rstudio (an integrated development environment for R) in an interactive manner. Participants will receive example data sets to practise data manipulation, graphical exploration and statistical hypothesis testing.

Audience

This "First Steps with R" two-day course is addressed to beginners wanting to become familiar with the R syntax, environment, and the most common commands to start using R to explore and interpret their data.

Learning objectives

At the end of the course, participants should be comfortable with the R environment and be able to read, understand and write R commands, allowing them to implement and interpret a workflow for their data analysis:

• interact with the R environment
• import data, explore it and summarise it
• explore data with graphs
• perform simple statistical tests

Prerequisites

Knowledge / competencies

As it is a course for beginners, no background in R or any programming language is required. However, you are encouraged to go through some of the R documentation available here.

Please also note this course is NOT a training on statistics but rather a training on how to use R to perform different tasks, statistics being one of them.

Technical

A Wi-Fi enabled laptop with latest R and RStudio versions installed. There will be access to the eduroam and guest network.

Application

Registration fees are 200 CHF for academics and 1000 CHF for for-profit companies. While participants are registered on a first come, first served basis, exceptions may be made to ensure diversity and equity, which may increase the time before your registration is confirmed.

Applications will close as soon as the places will be filled up. Deadline for free-of-charge cancellation is set to 05/10/2023. Cancellation after this date will not be reimbursed. Please note that participation to SIB courses is subject to our general conditions.

You will be informed by email of your registration confirmation. Upon reception of the confirmation email, participants will be asked to confirm attendance by paying the fees within 5 days.

Venue and time

The course will take place in at the University of Zurich, Rämistrasse 71.

It will start at 9:00 and end around 17:30.

Precise information will be provided to the participants on due time.

Additional information

Coordination: Monique Zahn, SIB Training Group.

We will recommend 0.5 ECTS credits for this course (given a passed exam at the end of the course).

You are welcome to register to the SIB courses mailing list to be informed of all future courses and workshops, as well as all important deadlines using the form here.

SIB abides by the ELIXIR Code of Conduct. Participants of SIB courses are also required to abide by the same code.

For more information, please contact training@sib.swiss.