Experimental Design and Data Analysis

The goals of BIOE286 (CSP 241) are to train the students in:

1) basic experimental design
2) exploratory data analysis from a graphical perspective
3) hands-on stats from t-tests to (hopefully) multivariate analyses (MDS, MANOVA and PCA)
4) graphical theory: how statistical results should be depicted

The course will be structured around statistical analysis and graphics programs: JMP PRO (available free to all UCSC students). Students wanting to work in the R environment may do so but we will not be teaching R in this course.

I highly recommend the stats book by Quinn and Keough: Experimental Design and Data Analysis for Biologists. The intent of this course is NOT to teach the theoretical underpinnings of inferential statistics, which is well beyond the scope of a 1 quarter course (there are other more suitable courses for this task in Applied Math). Rather, the emphasis is to produce students that are competent to design their own experiments and surveys and to analyze and depict their data.