FOUNDATIONAL AND APPLIED STATISTICS FOR BIOLOGISTS using r

Motivation Statisticians have complained to me at national meetings that biologists should be prevented from attempting serious statistical analyses because they often misapply procedures and misinterpret outcomes. This view, however, is unproductive. The biologist, in the ideal, is the best possible analyst of biological data because she is knowledgeable about the system to which inferences are being made.

 

The premise of this book is that the establishment of solid statistical foundations leads inexorably to the correct application of procedures, a clear understanding of analyses, and valid inferences concerning phenomena under study. However the process of implementing such an approach is less than straightforward. It requires, in my view, exposure to the philosophy of science and a willingness to address underlying mathematics. This is a departure from classic biometric texts, which discuss applications without underpinnings.

 

Approach My pedagogic approach is to encourage students to actively construct their own sense of what is being learned. This is geatly faciliated by the R computational environment. Unlike commercial statistical software R does not hide its algorithms in black boxes. Instead complex procedures can be viewed step by step to elucidate the process of obtaining the results shown in textbooks.  In addition, the superb graphical capabilities of R allow interactive demonstrations to aid in comprehension.  A companion library to this book called asbio has been created specifically for this purpose.

 

A link to the classroom-tested document "Introduction to R" is also included with the purchase of the text (see left panel links).

 

 

ASBIO SOFTWARE

A novice to command line interfaces can install and load asbio, and access the central “point and click” book menu by typing just three commands into R:
install.packages("asbio")
library(asbio)
book.menu()

 

Subsequent access to the menu during new work sessions requires only the last two commands.