Introduction to Health Data Science

This course will introduce students to core data science skills and concepts through the exploration of applied biostatistics. The course will begin with an introduction to the R programming language and the RStudio IDE, focusing on contemporary tidyverse functions and reproducible programming methods. Then, the course will instruct students in contemporary data manipulation and visualization tools while systematically covering core applied biostatistics topics, including confidence intervals, hypothesis testing, permutation tests, and logistic and linear regression. Finally, the semester will end with an introduction to machine learning concepts, including terminology, best practices in test/training sets, cross-validation, and a survey of contemporary classification and regression algorithms.