The EU COST FA1103 Training School 2014: Experimental Design and Statistical Data Analysis: applications in R for environmental, biological and health data will be held on the University of Évora, Largo dos Colegiais, 7000 Évora, Portugal.
Évora is a quiet and delightful historical city in Alentejo, in the south of Portugal, in the middle of a softly waving peneplain, touched by a Mediterranean climate sweetened by the Atlantic influence of hot, long and dry summers, and soft winters. A small city of about 60.000 residents with whitewashed houses, arches, and twisting alleyways, 130 km from Lisbon, it was classified by Unesco as a World Heritage Site. It is a true open-air museum.
University of Évora was the second university to be founded in Portugal, in April 1559, “with the right to teach all subjects, except medicine, law and civil litigation part of Canon Law.”
The Training School is aimed to provide researchers with the basic skills to design, to statistically analyse their data and to interpret the results within the framework of the Generalized Linear models and the Analysis of Variance. Emphasis will be placed in the modelling aspects of the analysis and the concepts behind the formula more that in their mathematical derivations. The modelling approach gives the researcher the freedom and flexibility to allow easy generalisations so that almost any experiment can be analysed without the constraints of the "canned" classical designs.

The School will include four hours of theoretical aspects in the morning and two hours of hands-on practice in the afternoon. It is not intended to be a course on "how to use a computer package" while the focus will be placed on the methods rather than in the computing aspects. The topics that will be covered will range from the review of basic statistical principles like estimation, hypothesis testing and exploratory data analysis using graphs to more advanced areas like modelling, mixed linear models and mean comparison methods. Classical designs will be discussed on the light of the modelling approach.

Trainers:
Manuela Oliveira, Universidade de Évora, Portugal.
Isabel Natário, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal
Paula Simões, Instituto Superior de Engenharia de Lisboa, Portugal