UNIL MSc course: Data Science 2025
Introduction This course is for MSc students from the Medical Biology (MB) master program. The goal is to review fundamental notions in statistics and show how they are useful for basic data analysis challenges in biology and medicine.
Prerequisites Students who follow this course should already have some basic knowledge in statistics and R equivalent to the one achieved by bachelor students at the University of Lausanne.
Resources The following software is required for this course:
- a recent version of R (in doubt, simply download and install the latest version from the R website at https://stat.ethz.ch/CRAN/ -- many potential problems are solved by simply upgrading to the latest R version)
- RStudio (which you can download from http://www.rstudio.com/products/rstudio/download/)
Schedule and content This course includes four 2h frontal lectures:
- 24.02.2025 8:15-10:00 Basic notions of probability theory, Central Limit Theorem (Slides)
- 25.02.2025 8:15-10:00 Important distributions and tests, sampling and estimates (Slides)
- 26.02.2025 8:15-10:00 Introduction to linear regression (Slides)
- 27.02.2025 8:15-10:00 Introduction to generalised linear models (Slides)
The lectures are accompanied by supervised exercise sessions (see below) that follow the lectures (10:15-12:00).
Exercises and grades This course has no oral or written exam; instead students are given a practical exercise on 28.2.2025 8:15-12:00. They need to submit their solution by noon. Submission should be done via Moodle, but you can also send your exercise to Sven.Bergmann@unil.ch in case this does not work.
To practise there will be four exercise sessions - one for each lecture. These sessions take place from 10:15 to 12:00. Each session is thematically linked to the morning lecture on the same day. There will be assistants to help students with practical questions.
