BFB12 - Biostatistical Foundations in Bioinformatics

   IMPORTANT DATES for BFB12
   Deadline for applications: November 17th 2012 
   Latest Notification of Acceptance: November 18th 2012
   Course date: December 3rd - December 7th 2012

With Lisete Sousa and Carina Silva-Fortes

We are proud to annouce the third edition of our Foundations course in BioStatistics.

Led by the firm hand of two Statisticians that have their research work centered in the Life Sciences, participants go through a comprehensive set of short lectures and guided hands-on exercises. The course revisits concepts bottom-up from probability to classification, using an exclusive set of bioinformatics examples. It is a five day opportunity to put statistics back in shape, to acquire confidence in methods and to learn how to write small scripts using open source software (R).

*Course description:*

This is one of our "Foundations" type courses, providing a systematic and detailed review of fundamental concepts and techniques used in Bioinformatics. Many analytical and inferential methods, regardless of their novelty, have their niches of application all over the place in Bioinformatics. Newer techniques such as the ones employed in high throughput data analysis are not different in this respect. We will be looking at statistical methods, digging into their inner workings, wearing the skins of professional statisticians. Attendees can expect to attend a thorough set of lectures that will reveal the conceptual frameworks that are needed to understand the methods, and extensive hands-on practice, exclusively based on biological examples.

*Target Audience*
Everybody using Bioinformatics methods is implicitly using statistical methods. Most people have had one or more semester courses in Statistics in their graduate education. For many, Statistics happened in their lives a long a time ago, and that makes it difficult to go back and manipulate the concepts with full confidence. Moreover, proper judgement of the results often calls for a deeper level of understanding than what is required to solve scholarly exercises.

Attending this course is a chance of revisiting subjects like experimental design, hypothesis testing, inference and prediction in an intensive and systematic way. We will look into particular areas such as Bayesian Inference, Hidden Markov Chains and Multivariate methods with the attitude, eyes and brains of a statistician that wants to understand how the methods work.
Methodology
The course will introduce a relatively high number of concepts and methods. To keep it highly practical, we will spend most of the time in hands-on sessions.
- We will focus on each method using examples taken from real world Bioinformatics practice.
- We will then dissect the method, identifying the concepts and exploring their interrelationships.
- The applicability and limitations of each method will be emphasized.
- The use of the method will be illustrated using appropriate Bioinformatics tools and biological data resources.

For more information, application procedures, etc. please visit

http://gtpb.igc.gulbenkian.pt/bicourses/BFB12

Thank you for your interest!     (deadlinefor applications Nov 17th)

Pedro Fernandes
GTPB Coordinator