MASC507 PROGRAMMING IN R FOR MARINE SCIENCES

Course Objectives

By the end of the course, the students are expected to

• be competent in programming R.
• be able to give both a quantitative and a qualitative description of a dataset using elementary statistical measures and graphs,
• be familiar with basic concepts of probability and distributions and their relation to data analysis,
• be able to analyze the relationship between different variables in a dataset,
• be able to conceive and test hypotheses concerning univariate and multivariate datasets,

Course Content

This course is intended to serve as an introduction to R programming as well as statistical concepts and data analysis techniques relevant to students of marine sciences. The statistical topics of interest include descriptive statistics, probability and distributions, hypothesis testing for uni-variate, multivariate and categorical data-sets, regression, correlation and non-linear curve fitting. The R computational environment will be used to analyze oceanographic data sets through the numerical implementation of the methods learned in the lectures.

Course Learning Outcomes

• Basic working knowledge of the R programming environment.
• Ability to use basic statistical methods on oceanographic datasets.
• Ability to interpret the results of statistical analyses.