BioData-Training-School-2025

Fundamentals of Biological Data Analysis with R

December 10-13, 2025; University of Tirana, Albania

The BioData Training School 2025 — Fundamentals of Biological Data Analysis with R - will be an intensive, hands-on training aimed at students, researchers, and early-career professionals who want to start building skills in biological data analysis. The training will combine interactive lectures, guided exercises, and hands-on analysis of real-world datasets. The goal is to teach participants how to manage, visualize, and analyze biological data using the R programming language. In addition to core topics such as data cleaning, exploratory analysis, statistical modeling, and machine learning algorithms, the course will introduce key bioinformatics basics, including working with sequence data, functional annotation, and interpreting findings.

For more information about this training school follow this link

Training Schedule & Materials

Day 1 - December 10: Fundamentals of Biostatistics in R

Time (CET)	Activity	Topic	Lecturer	Materials
9:30 AM	Lecture 1	Concepts of biological data and biostatistics	Eliana Ibrahimi	📂 Materials
11:00 AM	Lecture 2 + Practical	Intro to R and data handling	Brooke N. Wolford	📂 Materials
1:30 PM	Lecture 3 + Practical	Intro to statistical modeling - Applied linear models	Eliana Ibrahimi	📂 Materials
3:00 PM	Lecture 4 + Practical	Data visualization and dimensionality reduction techniques	Ariol Rama	📂 Materials
4:00 PM	Project	Introducing the group project	Alise Ponsero, Eliana Ibrahimi	📂 Materials

Day 2 - December 11: Fundamentals of Machine Learning in R

Time (CET)	Activity	Topic	Lecturer	Materials
9:00 AM	Lecture 1 + Practical	Intro to ML, Supervised learning (Regression)	Alise Ponsero	📂 Materials
11:00 AM	Lecture 2 + Practical	Supervised learning: Classification	Marta B. Lopes	📂 Materials
1:30 PM	Lecture 3 + Practical	Unsupervised learning	Alise Ponsero	📂 Materials
3:15 PM	Lecture 4	Tutorial on Predomics	Edi Prifti	📂 Materials
4:00 PM	Project	Work on the group project	Ana Menkshi, Fatjona Murrani, Selma Saliaj	📂 Materials

Day 3 - December 12: Fundamentals of Bioinformatics in R

Time (CET)	Activity	Topic	Lecturer	Materials
9:00 AM	Lecture 1	Intro to bioinformatics, foundations and applications	Alise Ponsero	📂 Materials
10:30 AM	Lecture 2 + Practical	Gene expression analysis - From counts to biological meaning	Ilir Sheraj	📂 Materials
1:00 PM	Lecture 3 + Practical	Gene set enrichment analysis - Decoding biological pathways and networks	Ilir Sheraj	📂 Materials
2:30 PM	Lecture 4	Tutorial: Single cell data analysis in R	Gesmira Molla	📂 Materials
3:30 PM	Project	Group project work	Ana Menkshi, Fatjona Murrani, Selma Saliaj	📂 Materials

Day 4 - December 13: Group Project Work

Time	Activity	Topic	Lecturer
8:30 AM	Open discussion	Discussion on LLM and ChatGPT	Trainers and trainees
9:30 AM	Project	Group project	Trainers and trainees
12:00 PM	Project	Project Presentation	Trainees

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Getting Started

Prerequisites

• R (version 4.0 or higher)
• RStudio
• Posit Cloud account (backup option)

Communication

We will use Slack for all communication during the training. Please join the dedicated channel using the invitation sent to your email.