Statistics with R

Course teacher: Roland Fuß

Timing and duration: September to November 2023 – may be repeated on demand

This course is conducted on eight Fridays during the autumn semester. Course dates are 15.09., 29.09., 13.10., 27.10., 10.11., 24.11., at 9:00-14:00 hrs (with one hour lunch break). If necessary, there will be two more dates.
To gain a course certificate, each participant is required to attend a minimum of four sessions.

Registrations: Course offer will be circulated by the institution mailing lists.

https://terminplaner6.dfn.de/p/1ddd48562fcbebe953a4a1429a1785c2-252047

The number of participants is limited to 25. PhDs of the Thünen Institute of Climate-Smart Agriculture are given priority.

Target group: Mainly PhD students, but also other early-career researchers

Course description and learning aims:

The course is intended to prepare for typical statistical challenges encountered when analysing data from field and lab studies in agricultural and soil science. It will be focused on practical examples and be light on theory. The course will use R as a tool; rudimentary knowledge of R will be sufficient but it will be needed to follow the course when more advanced models are covered.

The course will start by revisiting undergrad-level statistics such as data exploration and descriptive statistics, distribution models, hypothesis tests, ANOVA. It will also cover some non-parametric statistics. The main focus will be on regression models: linear regression, robust regression, orthogonal regression, non-linear regression, non-gaussian error distributions (generalized linear models), modelling heterogeneity, dependency structures (mixed-effects models), generalized additive models.