The main purpose of the course is to familiarize students with the principles and basic methods used to study the nervous system. The course also aims to familiarize students with the terminology used in scientific publications concerning research related to the nervous system. The methods taught cover a wide range starting from molecular methods for the analysis of nervous system genes to the development of new drugs. The course focuses on an in-depth understanding of the basic principles underlying the methodological approaches taught.

Learning Objectives:

- Comprehension of statistical concepts and methods widely used in biomedical research

- Ability to interpret the results of statistical analyses as well as the documented critical evaluation of the statistical methodology of biomedical publications.

 

Course content:

 Random variables (continuous and discrete).

  The concept of probability, joint probability, conditional probability, Bayes’ theorem.

– Descriptive statistics (frequency distributions, measures of central tendency).

– Key distributions: Poisson, Bernoulli, Binomial, Uniform, Normal, Student, Chi-square.

– Normal distribution: properties and calculations

– Sampling, central limit theorem, confidence region.

– Statistical Hypotheses Tests: significance level, p-value, type I & II errors.

– Parametric hypothesis tests (z-test, t-test, paired t-test), Analysis of Variance (ANOVA).

– Applications: noise, selecting and applying statistical tests, fitting models to data, estimating variable correlation, dimension reduction, data classification, signal to noise ratio.

– Intro to statistics using Python.