Lecture 1 Introduction to course

Eamonn Mallon

2026-10-05

About me

  • Eamonn Mallon
  • Its pronounced Ay-Man
  • Professor/Head of Division of Genetics and Genome Biology
  • ebm3@le.ac.uk
  • Education/background: B.A. (Mod) in Zoology (Trinity College Dublin), and PhD (University of Bath)
  • Research: Ageing and Epigenetics

Lecture outline

  • Why do statistics
    • Fundamental to Bioscience
    • Transferable skill
    • Life Skill
  • Which program? -R
  • Aims of course
  • Structure of course
  • Structure of week

Statistics is fundamental to Bioscience

  • My first big insight into science

Statistics is fundamental to Bioscience

  • My second

Signal from noise

Statistics is fundamental to Bioscience

Statistics is fundamental to Bioscience

  • Bioscience is a data science
  • Statistics is just experimental design (class example)

What we just did

Let’s do a proper test

Vote on Mentimeter

Low replication

High replication

High replication (real difference)

Transferrable skill

Life skill

“Statistical thinking will one day be as necessary for efficient citizenship as the ability to read and write”

Life skill

Chair: if “good” requires pupil performance to exceed the national average, and if all schools must be good, how is this mathematically possible?

Michael Gove: By getting better all the time.

Chair: So it is possible, is it?

Vote now

Michael Gove: It is possible to get better all the time.

Chair: Were you better at literacy than numeracy, Secretary of State?

Michael Gove: I cannot remember.

link

What program

  • Excel
  • SPSS, Stata, Minitab, Graphpad prism ($150.00/year/user)
  • Python (more general, free)
  • R (free)
  • Which have you used

R’s popularity

Update

R is too hard

Doing a histogram in excel

Doing a histogram in R

hist(mtcars$mpg)

Rstudio: R’s IDE

What I would like you to get out of your first year data science

  • Why do we do statistics? Separating signal from noise
  • R is a useful thing to learn
  • A properly designed experiment can always be analysed, no amount of stats will save a poor experiment
  • A few statistical techniques to get you started
  • A burning desire to come and do the second year course

Structure of the statistics teaching

  • Taught over BS1040 and BS1070/MB1080
  • Tested by continous assessment and in the exams
  • BS1040
    • Today: Getting started
    • Central tendency and variation
    • Single samples
    • Two samples
  • BS1070/MS1080
    • Regression
    • Analysis of variance
    • Reproducible science / Looking forward to second year

Structure of each fortnight

  • Friday before - material released
  • 1st Monday lecture
  • 1st Wednesday Help session
  • 2nd Wednesday (week later) submit MCQs

What have you learned today

  • Why you should do stats
  • How you are going to learn it