This site supports Experimental design and data analysis for biologists, 2nd edition, by Gerry Quinn and Mick Keough. It provides exercises, online (expanded and with code) versions of the worked example boxes. It will also have, improved or corrected code, any corrections, and papers that provide additional examples of particular statistical approaches. Please also keep an eye on our personal website, qkstats.com, for less formal thoughts. If you’re an instructor, please go to Cambridge’s online resources for more material.
These versions are for the Boxes that are not self-contained explanations or discussions within the book. The worked examples were pretty much all done in R, and the online versions include the R code available for students, often including additional analysis such as recommended EDA and alternative ways to approach an analysis. For many, the online versions contain images or links to images, showing study organisms or sampling designs.
Updates will include cleaner code, corrections, and updated code when new versions of R and its packages break things.
In addition to the examples used in the book, we collected other papers for possible use. In some cases, we didn’t use the papers because we already had enough for that topic, so they are simply extras. In other cases, however, we may have omitted the paper because we couldn’t easily decipher the data files (our attention spans are short!). These papers are useful as examples of how particular techniques have been used, and they can also be used for discussions and critiques. We’ve tried to use only papers where the paper and its data are freely available.
We’ve provided exercises for most chapters. The exercises cover several situations - building on conceptual understanding, identifying appropriate models from descriptions of data collection, interpreting model assumptions, and interpreting analyses. In the early and late chapters, there isn’t much running of analyses, but chapters 5-16 typically require some analysis and interpretation. We’ve provide links to the data files for these exercises.
If you’re an instructor, you can access R code and suggested answers.
If you’re assembling the material into a local directory, you should take note of the folder structure we’ve used for material.
The home folder includes:
the home page (index.html) and html files for exercises, further examples, and examples
data folder, with data files for examples and exercises
R folder, which includes common R scripts (2)
examples folder, which has the code for each worked example as a separate html file
exercises folder, which has descriptions of exercises, with each chapter as a separate html file
media folder, which includes images, word documents
You can find more details of the these folders by going to the worked examples page.