Research Methods Events
Multivariate Data Analysis for Environmental Biologists
Availability | |
Organising Department | Postgraduate Statistics Centre |
Organising Institution | Lancaster University |
Location | Lancaster University |
Country | |
Start date | 23/03/10 |
End date | 25/03/10 |
Contact | Deborah Stewart d.l.stewart@lancaster.ac.uk +44 (0)1524 593940 |
Website and registration | http://shortcourses.maths.lancs.ac.uk/multivariate_data_analysis |
Type of event | Residential up to 1 week |
Name of organiser, presenter or chair | Professor Michael Greenacre & Professor Paul Primicerio |
Additional info | The world around us — and especially the biological world — is inherently multidimensional. Biological diversity is the product of the interaction between many species, be they marine, plant or animal life, and of the many limiting factors that characterize the environment in which the species live. The environment itself is a complex mix of natural and man-made parameters: for example, meteorological parameters such as temperature or rainfall, physical parameters such as soil composition or sea depth, and chemical parameters such as level of carbon dioxide or heavy metal pollution. This workshop focuses on the statistical modelling of biological and environmental data from a multivariate point of view. This means that we are not satisfied simply to summarize single variables in isolation — we wish rather to explore relationships between and within groups of biotic and abiotic variables in order to characterize the ecological system that is operating. The first part of the workshop introduces statistical techniques that describe and model biological variation and environmental variation separately. The second part is devoted to relationships between biological and environmental variables, starting with distance-based graphical methods such as canonical correspondence analysis and continuing to parametric and nonparametric models of classification and regression. By the end of the workshop participants should be able to tackle advanced statistical analyses of their own data. Presented by Michael Greenacre, an applied statistician, and Raul Primicerio, an ecologist, this workshop is designed to give a comprehensive introduction to the multivariate methods that are most useful for environmental biologists. The workshop is also aimed at applied statisticians interested in this area of research. The emphasis is on the main concepts underlying the methods and how to apply them in practice, therefore many illustrative examples will be presented. Many of these examples will be in the field of marine biology, but we will also include case studies of freshwater and terrestrial communities, using datasets from papers published in high impact journals, including Science, Journal of Animal Ecology, and Marine Ecology Progress Series. In the practical sessions every afternoon, participants will have a chance to work on assigned problems and their own data, under the instructors’ guidance. Computers will be provided for use during the practical sessions and participants are urged to bring their own data sets. The free software program R will be used throughout the course. The R program as well as abundant documentation can be freely downloaded at www.r-project.org. There are many introductory texts in R as well as free online tutorials, for example: http://faculty.washington.edu/tlumley/Rcourse/R-fundamentals.pdf. Course notes will be provided as well as several relevant documents on statistical analysis and preparation of scientific papers. |
Cost | Postgraduate Students - £90 Academic Staff from HE Institutions - £180 Participants from non-HE Institutions - £660 Lancaster University Staff and Postgraduates - £75 |
Level | Intermediate (some prior knowledge) |
Keywords | Data Handling and Data Analysis, Multivariate Analysis |
Funding | |
Establishment | NCRM |
Type of NCRM event |
