What is this ‘book’ and how will we use it?

This ‘book’ functions as an extensive syllabus and course notes. I will embed youtube videos, app-based demonstrations and class exercises. As noted above, there are some things I will include that will not be necessary for everyone, and I will clearly mark these sections.

I hope that this book provides clear and useful background for the course, and I advise you to regularly go through each book ‘chapter’ for the relevant week. Be sure you get familiar with the content BEFORE class.

Note that this ‘book’ is not the entirety of the course content, and is not an original piece of my own effort – in addition from lifting from a few other course online (with attribution), I also make heavy use of these texts:

  • The Analysis of Biological Data Third Edition (Whitlock and Schluter 2020): This is the official book of this course, and is a standard biostats textbook, with many useful resources available online. The writing is great, as are the examples. Most of my material originates here (although I occasionally do things a bit differently). This book is officially optional, but students consistently tell me that it is extremely helpful. So, I highly recommend buying it. You can get the newest edition here, but any edition will be pretty useful.

  • Calling Bullshit (Bergstrom and West 2020): This book is not technical, but points to the big picture concerns of statisticians. It is very practical and well written. I will occasionally assign readings from this book, and/or point you to videos on their website. All readings will be made available for you, but you might want to buy a physical copy.

  • Fundamentals of Data Visualization (Wilke 2019): This book is free online, and is very helpful for thinking about graphing data. In my view, graphing is among the most important skills in statistical reasoning, so I reference it regularly.

  • R for Data Science (Grolemund and Wickham 2018): This book is free online, and is very helpful for doing the sorts of things we do in R regularly. This is a great resource.

I will introduce other resources as we go.

References

Bergstrom, Carl T, and Jevin D West. 2020. Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World. Random House.
Grolemund, Garrett, and Hadley Wickham. 2018. “R for Data Science.”
Whitlock, Michael C, and Dolph Schluter. 2020. The Analysis of Biological Data. Third Edition.
Wilke, Claus O. 2019. Fundamentals of Data Visualization: A Primer on Making Informative and Compelling Figures. O’Reilly Media.