Multivariate Statistics with R for Biological Sciences

20 hours course

This course will focus on the most useful techniques of multivariate statistical analysis in Biological sciences. These will be principal component analysis, canonical correspondence analysis, multidimensional scaling, discriminant analysis and cluster analysis. Other techniques, such as correspondence analysis and factor analysis will be approached in a simpler way. Lastly, some techniques will be approached in a very introductory way, as it will be the case of canonical correlation, and redundancy analysis. A brief introduction to parametron and non-parametric techniques for hypothesis contrasts (Hoteling test, MANOVA, PERMANOVA) will also be part of the first session.

Although this course uses the R programming language as the basis for the examples and exercises, which will undoubtedly help the student to become more familiar with it, learning this language is not an objective of this course.

GOALS/SKILLS

The general aim of the course is to become familiar with the basic concepts of multivariate statistics and to know in detail the main techniques. The methodology to do it consists of exemplified theoretical explanations, for which the open source programming language R will be used. Students will receive the course lesson material in pdf format, which contains the theoretical explanations together with worked examples. The examples will also be provided as scripts in R language. In addition, students will be provided with data files, which will be used to perform a series of exercises during class hours. These exercises will also be reviewed during class hours.

Prerequisites: Basic knowledge of R

INSTRUCTOR

Aldo Barreiro Felpeto is a researcher at Centro Interdisciplinar de Investigação Marinha e Ambiental (CIIMAR) associated to the University of Porto (Porto, Portugal). His research career has focused in plankton ecology. He defended his Ph.D. dissertation in 2007 in the Department of Ecology at the University of Vigo (Vigo, Spain) about interactions between zooplankton and toxic phytoplankton species from the Spanish NW Atlantic coast, southern Baltic sea and southern Tirreno coast. In 2008-2010, he performed a post-doctorate in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Cornell University (Ithaca, New York, USA). Since 2011 he is a researcher at CIIMAR.