Current course offerings

Please Note: Course profiles marked as not available may still be in development.

Course description

Large data sets are becoming increasingly common in both the life and environmental sciences. They are also vital for addressing global challenges such as biodiversity loss, climate change and global pandemics. Consider for example satellite data capturing global coral reef biodiversity, worldwide daily temperatures measured over decades, or genome sequences of thousands of viruses. This course will provide you with the tools to handle, visualise and analyse such large data sets. Topics covered include data processing (cleaning, exploring & wrangling), an overview of key data types and structures (e.g., spatial, textual, and genomic data), key concepts of data visualisation, an introduction to machine learning, and a primer in simulations. A major focus of this course will be on reproducible research and communication. Throughout the course we will use the programming language R. No prior knowledge of programming or advanced statistics (beyond STAT1201) is assumed.