Factorial design and analysis

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This is a face-to-face course

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This training is organised in collaboration with the Helis Academy. More information see https://helisacademy.com/

Experimental research in life sciences can be complex. Understanding complicated biological processes, quantifying the influence of environmental parameters on the growth of an organism, getting to grips with simultaneous impacting factors and their interactions, optimizing research procedures or media recipes: all these require factorial experiments.

Factorial experiments can be very efficient, but the number of possible combinations quickly gets out of hand. Research facilities have limited capacity and have all sorts of constraints that do not fit the textbook solutions to factorial experiments.

In this course, realistic research cases form the starting point for which we will try to find practical solutions. We will tackle research questions by design tailor-made factorial experiments within the budget and lab constraints. Power analysis will be key to achieve this goal. Finally, we will analyse the expected output in a statistical sound manner, interpret the results and propose presentations.

Everything will be very practical and hands-on. Design and analysis happen in R. R code will be made available.

While discussing these practical cases, we will grab the opportunity to introduce the general principals of fractional factorial designs, optimal designs and their analysis and interpretation.

By this approach we hope to provide practical solutions while not too heavy dwelling on statistical theory.