This course focuses on realistic quantitative modeling of lab and field data. The main activity is learning to fit models to data using a statistical package and programming language called R. In this applied context, the course will visit a variety of philosophical topics: parsimony vs. realism, Bayesian vs. frequentist statistics, estimation vs. hypothesis testing. The course will enhance your ability to ask interesting biological questions with a quantitative flavor; and to construct, parameterize, and test models for your own data.
