Schedule 2025
qBio I
Tuesday, August 26th, 2025 – Thursday, October 9th, 2025
Tuesdays and Thursdays, 5:30 PM – 7:30 PM (except where noted)
Location: LC-504
Course Directors:
- Jason Banfelder (jbanfelder@rockefeller.edu)
- Luce Skrabanek (las2017@med.cornell.edu)
Teaching Assistant:
- Aria Dandawate (ard4008@med.cornell.edu)
Office Hours:
- Mondays from 5:30–6:30 PM by Zoom, and LC-504 (1300 York Ave)
This course will be fully graded: (Honors, High Pass, Low Pass, Fail)
Class Sessions and Lecture Notes
-
Quantifying a Sample Distribution | Code
Tuesday, 26 August, 2025
summary statistics, SD vs. SEM, measurement variation vs. biological variation -
Introduction to R Part I | Code
Thursday, 28 August, 2025 -
Probability Density Functions and the Normal Distribution | Code
Tuesday, 2 September, 2025
binomial, Poisson, and normal distributions, testing for normality: an introduction to formal statistical tests, qqplots vs. formal tests -
Introduction to R Part II | Code | ablation.csv
Thursday, 4 September, 2025 -
Confidence Intervals and Contingency Tables | Code
Tuesday, 9 September, 2025
t-tests, working with proportional data, why CIs are more informative than p-values, study types (retrospective, prospective, and cross sectional), working with rare events -
p-Values and Formal Statistical Testing | Code
Thursday, 11 September, 2025
duality between p-values and CIs, statistical vs. biological significance, choosing an appropriate α, type I and type II errors
Problem Set #1: Understanding Type I error rates -
Statistical Power and Experimental Design | Slides | Code
Tuesday, 16 September, 2025
why you cannot just add a few N to your dataset when p > 0.05, appreciating the economics (in time and money) of experimental design, statistical vs. biological significance revisited, designing experiments around hard-to-obtain samples -
Multiple Hypothesis Testing and Non-parametric Tests | Code
Thursday, 18 September, 2025
from Bonferroni to False Discovery Rate, dealing with non-normal data, t-tests re-visited -
Group project: the optimal stopping problem | Code
Code quality | R style
Tuesday, 23 September, 2025 -
Bayesian Methods | Code | Slides
Thursday, 25 September, 2025
how to incorporate prior knowledge into statistical models -
Correlation vs. Linear Regression | Code
Tuesday, 30 September, 2025
introduction to modeling in R; why is not the whole story -
Fitting Model Parameters to Data | Code
Thursday, 2 October, 2025
non-linear regression, a statistical view of curve fitting, confidence intervals revisited -
Quantitative Comparison of Models and ANOVA | Code
Tuesday, 7 October, 2025
how to avoid over-fitting, F-test and AICs, F-tests as a means of parameter estimation
Problem Set #3 -
Graphics with ggplot2 | Rmd file
ablation.csv
Violin plots | Normal curves
Data wrangling with tidyverse | Code
Thursday, 9 October, 2025