Publications by melliferrari
Data Analysis in R for Becoming a Bioscientist
Just sharing some teaching materials which might be useful. In the Department of Biology at the University of York in the UK, we teach Data Analysis in R from stage 1 to over 400 students. There are “Becoming a Bioscientist” modules in each of semester of the first two years. These are the stage 1 materials. In Data Analysis in R for Becoming ...
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Not all common gulls are Common Gulls…
… and non-normally distributed data can be normal One of the underlying assumptions of many statistical methods is that the data (or the model residuals) are normally distributed. I teach students to evaluate this assumption with plots and normality tests. When they find their data do not seem to be normally distributed, they often report: �...
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Fun and easy R graphs with images
Code for fun I feel passionately that anyone can learn some coding but many feel they lack natural aptitude for it. One of the things I always try to stress to those I am teaching is that it matters very much less what you do than that do you it. It doesn’t matter how small and trivial the result of the code is, or even how much of it you wrote...
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RStudio Anatomy
RStudio makes R easier to use. It includes a code editor, debugging & visualization tools. I love it but when beginners launch RStudio they are sometimes confused by all the panes and tabs. Here I have tried to give a quick visual guide to the anatomy of RStudio for people new to R, coding and RStudio. I’d love to know if I’ve missed anyth...
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R Code Anatomy
It’s a challenge for an experienced user to remember what it was like to be totally new to R and come up with explanations that don’t draw on understanding developed subsequently. Terminology with which you have become very familiar is, in fact, jargon. So I asked a novice, Elliot, to explain a piece of code in his own words. Elliot is a 17 y...
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Communicate your work with animated graphs in R!
It’s easy to animate graphs in R In this post am I going to show you how easy it is to animate figures in R thanks to the great ggplot2 extension gganimate written by Thomas Lin Pedersen and David Robinson This is something you might want to do to increase the impact of your work by communicating it through twitter, a website or live in a prese...
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Adding different annotation to each facet in ggplot
Help! The same annotations go on every facet! (with thanks to a student for sending me her attempt). This is a question I get fairly often and the answer is not straightforward especially for those that are relatively new to R and ggplot2. In this post, I will show you how to add different annotations to each facet. More like this: This is usef...
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Using DataCamp reduces anxiety about learning R!
I used DataCamp‘s excellent Introduction to R as Essential Prior Independent Study and found it made people a bit less worried about a term of R! I have a lot of fun teaching first year biology undergraduates but there are a few challenges in teaching data skills when they are not (perceived as) a student’s core discipline but instead requ...
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Introduction to Data Analysis in RStudio
I’ve just started doing one of my favourite parts of my job – teaching a term of Data Analysis in R to about three hundred Bioscientists in their first year of higher education. My blog last week included a figure of their expected level of enjoyment: However, I find they become very competent in both statistics and coding considering the...
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Royal Society of Biology: Introduction to Reproducible Analyses in R
Learn to experiment with R to make analyses and figures more reproducible If you’re in the UK and not too far from York you might be interested in a Royal Society of Biology course which forms part of the Industry Skills Certificate. More details at this link Introduction to Reproducible Analyses in R 24 June 2019 from 10:00 until 16:00 The ...
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