Apresentação da UC

Desenho Experimental e Análise Avançada de Dados Ecológicos

João O. Santos

joao.santos@ispa.pt

ISPA

2025-09-23

Course Intro

Tell Me About Yourselves

Tell Me About Yourselves

What’s your relation with:

• Research methods (experimental or observational)

• Statistics

• R/programming

• Reading scientific articles

Tell Me About Yourselves

• What topics are you most comfortable with?

Tell Me About Yourselves

• What topics are you least comfortable with?

Tell Me About Yourselves

• What topics would you like to learn about?

The Plan

The Plan

• Take a quick tour through philosophy of science

• Build a deep understanding of basic concepts

• Take a quick tour through the philosophy of statistics

• Quick intro to R, and some cool packages

• Learn a unifying framework to understanding statistics

  • The model comparison approach (Judd et al. 2017)

• Practice, practice, practice

The Method to the Madness

• In class discussions

• In class exercises

• Take-home exercises

• Ideally, lots and lots of exercises

Assessment Methods

• Individual report: 70%

• Group report: 20%

• Participation: 10%

The Tools

The Tools

The Tools

Help Me Help You

Try to Put In the Work

Try to Put In the Work

• There is no “perfect” experiment/study
  • Learning to reason about study design is a lifelong journey
• Data analysis is a skill one can become increasingly efficient in
  • Just don’t get stuck in a rut or a cargo cult (see Stark & Saltelli 2018)
• R is a language and programming a skill
  • We don’t just “learn” languages
  • We become proficient over a lifetime of speaking them

You’ll Get the Reward

• Solving puzzles is fun!

• Mastering a skill feels amazing!

Are You Ready?