Workshop

Wednesday, November 27 2024 01:00PM-04:00PM

Hybrid at McGill

Language of the workshop: EN & FR

Most ecologists have data that falls into groups: different species, sites, years, replicates. Typically we approach these situations with a hierarchical or mixed-effects model – but then we find the result tricky to fit and interpret. We need some kind of intermediate step between a simple model and a hierarchical one, one that lets us visualize and understand our data before modelling it all at once. We need a “secret weapon”.

The secret weapon takes a very simple approach: take your data and divide it into groups, fit the same model in each group, and then extract some summary information from each model and visualize these.

In this short workshop we’ll practice both the “how” and “why” of the Secret weapon approach. We’ll look at how to implement it easily using R, with an emphasis on the tidyverse. We’ll look at a couple of different example datasets from ecology. We’ll also talk about the connection to hierarchical models. The workshop will include some demonstrations, some exercises, and also some time to work on your own data if you have it.