Programming will be done in R and fluency at the level of Module 4: Introduction to R will be expected. Pre-requisites: Knowledge of Module 1, Probability and Statistical Inference.

This course is concerned with multivariate statistical analysis of microbiome data. We will briefly cover foundational concepts in microbial ecology, molecular biology, bioinformatics, and DNA sequencing.

The main focus of the course will be on developing an understanding of multivariate analysis of microbiome data. Practical skills to be developed in this course include managing high-dimensional and structured data in metagenomics, visualization and representation of high-dimensional data, normalization, filtering, and mixture-model noise modeling of count data, as well as clustering and predictive model building.