The RSS is taking some of its most popular courses out of London and is now offering a range of foundation and professional data-related courses in Cardiff, Leeds and Manchester in September 2018.
Our popular foundation course, Basic Statistics is being run at the Radisson Blu Hotel in Leeds on 13-14 September. Coached by Ellen Marshall, the statistics co-ordinator in the Maths and Statistics Help centre (MASH) at Sheffield University, the purpose of this course is to help participants understand some basic statistical concepts such as hypothesis testing and confidence interval estimation as well as how to develop a strategy for simple data analysis. Ellen is the winner of an internal student union award for Innovation in Academic skills development & Sigma Outstanding Contributor award in the field of Maths and Statistics Support.
In Manchester, we are running a course in Methods@Manchester. It's a course for those familiar with basic statistical methods and want to implement them using R or menu-driven statistical software. It will also help those who wish to extend their knowledge of regression modelling and using R for analysis. The course is taught by Dr Paul Baxter, a chartered statistician (CStat) and associate professor in biostatistics at the University of Leeds, Institute of Cardiovascular and Metabolic Medicine.
Also in Manchester, we're running a professional course in Lynda.com. This course is aimed at R users who want their audiences to interact with and explore their data using interactive tools and promises to show how easy it can be to build interactive charts, maps and tables with html widgets and how to quickly and easily build sophisticated interactive applications with Shiny.
Python for data analysis is taught by Rob Mastrodomenico, owner of Global Sports Statistics. It introduces Python to serial spreadsheet users and shows how, by writing code, you can perform all the analysis that you commonly do in spreadsheets, and much more.
Also running in Cardiff is a curated course on Spatial data analysis with R, which looks at how R can be used to load and interrogate spatial datasets as well as visualise it. The course is run by R expert Dr Colin Gillespie, a senior statistics lecturer at Newcastle University, and Dr Robin Lovelace, an expert in Geographic Information Systems.
Our third course in Cardiff is Mastering the Tidyverse, which introduces a suite of packages designed to remove the pain of data manipulation for statisticians and data scientists who deal with data on a day-to-day basis. The course walks delegates through delightfully named packages such as Tidyr, Tibbles and DPLRY to keep your data tidy. It's run by Dr Jamie Owen, who runs a number of courses in R and big data analytics at a wide range of organisations including the Francis Crick Institute and the Ministry of Defence.
'If you are simply interested in properly understanding the published literature or if you are embarking on conducting your own research, these courses are your first step,' says Atrima Khastgir, RSS marketing manager. 'Greater confidence in understanding statistical analysis and the results can benefit both working professional and those undertaking research themselves. It offers an easy entry into interpreting common statistical concepts without getting into the nitty-gritty of the mathematical formulae.'
See the full programme of courses being run by the RSS for the rest of 2018.