Topic: biological data

Develop Bayesian analyses of biological data from prior specification and posterior estimation to computational diagnostics and multimodal integration. Practical work covers conjugate and non-conjugate models, Gibbs and Hamiltonian Monte Carlo, convergence checks, hierarchical regression, regularisation and variational inference. Later sessions compare data-fusion strategies and Bayesian factor models while quantifying uncertainty in integrated biomedical datasets. Sessions: 30 November–4 December, 14:00–18:00 daily, Europe/Berlin (CET, UTC+01:00), with Slack discussion between meetings. Liv

Many of us came to biology from physics. There we have been trained on such classic examples as muon g-2, where experimental data and theoretical predictions agree to many significant digits. Now, working in biology, we routinely hear that it is messy, most details matter, and that the best hope for theory in biology is to be semi-qualitative, predict general trends, and to forgo the hope of ever making quantitative predictions with the precision that we are used to in physics. Colloquially, we should be satisfied even if data and models differ so much that plotting them on the same plot makes