Doing Clinical Research: Biostatistics with the Wolfram Language

This is the first week, welcoming you to the course. It establishes the aims of the course, states the basic assumptions, motivates for the use of the Wolfram Language, gives an overview, and describes the process of procuring the software that you will use in the course. All in all, it will provide you with all the information for successfully completing this course and gaining a remarkable new skill, the ability to do statistical analysis using the Wolfram Language.Through watching the video material, you will learn that there are two software products from which you can choose to complete the course and continue to use long after you are done. The first is the absolutely free version, which is software as a service, meaning it runs in any web browser. The second is desktop desktop version. If you work at, or are students at, an institution with a site licence, you will be able to get the software for free. There is also the option to purchase your own licence.

Welcome to week two, which consists of modules/chapters four to six. Now that you know a little bit about the Wolfram Language and its different coding environments, it is time to do some actual coding. The week will start off with module/chapter four, a demonstration of a completed project, though. It is just a little teaser to motivate you to push through and finish the course, by showcasing what you will be able to do at the end. Since statistical tests are all about math (don't worry, this course is not about the math), in module/chapter five we are going to learn to code by doing simple arithmetic. That is addition, subtraction, multiplication, and so on. Once you have realized just how simple these tasks are, you will be introduced to the way in which data is stored in a computer language in module/chapter six. This is the stepping stone required to bringing in your own data, ready for the analyses in weeks three and four.

Now that you can write some code and import your data, the time has come to start analyzing it, which we will do this week in modules seven to nine. The two most important steps to understand the message hidden in data, is to summarize and visualize it. Descriptive statistics turn rows and columns of data into something that we as humans can understand. By summarizing values and replacing them with single values, we start to get an idea of what our analyses might show.Visualizing the data is an even better way of getting to grips with data. Box-and-whisker plots, scatter plots, bar charts, and the like are wonderful ways to augment your understanding of the data.The Wolfram Language makes summary statistics easy, but is really shines when creating plots. There is almost no limits to customizing plots. No matter what your project requirements, you will learn to create plots that work for you.