Course Schedule
Day 1: Foundations & Unsupervised Methods
Focus: Understanding data structure and discovering patterns without predefined groups
| Time | Topic | Materials |
|---|---|---|
| 09:15–09:45 | Welcome & Why Multivariate Statistics? | Page |
| 09:45–10:45 | Correlation, Covariance & Multicollinearity | Page CorCov / Page Multi |
| 10:45–11:00 | 🪫 -Break-> 🔋 | |
| 11:00–12:15 | Clustering Methods | Page |
| 12:15–13:15 | 🍕 Lunch | |
| 13:15–14:30 | Principal Component Analysis (PCA) | Page |
| 14:30–14:45 | 🪫 -Break-> 🔋 | |
| 14:45–16:15 | Ordination (NMDS/PCoA) | Page |
| 16:15–16:30 | Day 1 Wrap-up & Q&A (+ intro to CCA if time allows) |
Learning Objectives
By the end of Day 1, you will be able to:
- Understand and interpret correlation and covariance matrices
- Recognise and handle multicollinearity in your data
- Use hierarchical and k-means clustering to find groups
- Apply PCA to reduce dimensionality and visualise patterns
- Perform NMDS and PCoA ordination
- Choose appropriate distance metrics for your data type
Day 2: Supervised & Constrained Methods
Focus: Predicting group membership and linking community patterns to environmental drivers
| Time | Topic | Materials |
|---|---|---|
| 09:00–10:30 | Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) | Page |
| 10:30–10:45 | 🪫 -Break-> 🔋 | |
| 10:45–12:15 | Logistic Regression | Page |
| 12:15–13:15 | 🥙 Lunch | |
| 13:15–14:30 | PERMANOVA | Page |
| 14:30–14:45 | 🪫 -Break-> 🔋 | |
| 14:45–16:00 | Constrained Ordination (RDA/CCA) | Page |
| 16:00–16:30 | Method Selection & Course Wrap-up | Decision Guide |
Learning Objectives
By the end of Day 2, you will be able to:
- Classify samples using LDA and interpret discriminant functions
- Build and validate logistic regression models
- Test for group differences in multivariate space using PERMANOVA
- Use constrained ordination (RDA/CCA) to relate community composition to environmental variables
- Select the appropriate method for your own research question
What to Bring
- Laptop with R (≥ 4.0) and RStudio installed
- R packages installed in advance (see R Setup & Basics)
- Power adapter (limited outlets available)
See you end of March!