I did not participate in last year’s training. May I still participate in this one? Yes, of course you may, and I think you can get a lot out of it whether or not you participated last year. We will briefly review the basics of the Bayesian approach first thing on Day 1. But it might help you out to read the Lesson 1 materials or watch the video recording of the 2023 workshop. They are available on the SEAStats page under “Bayesian mixed models with brms”.
I want to work on my R coding/stats skills before the lesson. Do you have any recommendations for me? You can start by trying out the basic R lessons or any of the other lessons on the SEAStats page. I’ve also compiled a list of my favorite learning resources for both R programming and statistical modeling. And some of my ARS statistician colleagues have posted a list of freely available R and stats tutorials on the SciNet learning page. Check those out!
I don’t have R installed on my USDA computer. Can I still follow along with the class? I will be providing a demo server for the workshop that has R and all the necessary packages installed on it. You can follow along with the lessons on the demo server. That way, we do not spend precious instructional time worrying about software when we could be thinking about stats. Closer to the date of the workshop, I’ll give you the info you need to get connected to the demo server. But if you want to use what you learned for your own work later, you will need to install everything on your own machine. Instructions are here; don’t sweat it if you can’t get it figured out now because you will not need it for the workshop, only for the long term.