• Advanced Courses in Life Sciences

    Header of Statistics at Transmitting Science

Home » Courses » Statistics and Bioinformatics » Introduction to Machine Learning in R

Live Online Course – 4th Edition

Introduction to Machine Learning in R

January 8th, 15th, 22nd, and 29th, 2027

Course Introduction to machine learning in R

Course Overview

Machine Learning is an extremely popular topic within the field of Artificial Intelligence. If harnessed correctly, it can be a powerful tool in research.

The aim of the course is to introduce participants to the main components for implementing Machine Learning in R using the {tidymodels} and {tidyverse} framework packages. By the end of the course, students will be able to perform the necessary tasks for machine learning such as defining the problem, prepare and pre-process data, and apply different machine learning algorithms such as Extreme Gradient Boosting, Random Forests etc. In addition, we explore how to fit a model and evaluate its performance as well as measuring the accuracy of model predictions.

This course includes a range of activities such as model building demos, live-coding sessions, interactive quizzes, and practical exercises to work individually or in a group. Active participation and contribution are highly recommended and encouraged.

Places are limited to 15 participants.

Programme

Get started with Machine Learning

  • What is Machine Learning?
  • What are typical problems solved using ML?
  • What are the different types of learning?

Machine Learning in R resources/background

  • Explore R packages designed for Machine Learning
  • Find out about framework packages such as {tidymodels}
  • Brief introduction to deep learning and Kaggle competitions

Explore and prepare the data

  • Load and prepare various datasets
  • Define the problem

Design machine learning workflow

  • Split datasets
  • Introduction to regression and classification problems
  • Specify a model and set its mode and arguments

Data Pre-process

  • How to deal with categorical variables
  • What to do when we have missing values

Machine Learning Algorithms

  • What are sources of error
  • Introduce the Decision Tree algorithm
  • Introduce the Random Forest algorithm
  • Introduce the Gradient Boosting algorithm

Resampling and Tuning

  • What is cross-validation
  • Perform hyper-parameter tuning

Regression and Clustering

  • Solve a regression problem
  • Carry out K-means clustering

Assumed Background

Course participants are expected to have a good working knowledge of the R programming language. It is assumed that participants have some prior experience in basic data analysis (such as data manipulation and visualisation) and a basic understanding of statistics. No prior knowledge of machine learning theory is required.

Software

All participants must have a computer (Windows, Macintosh) with current versions of R, R Studio and relevant packages pre-installed. If you have any problem installing them, please contact the course coordinator.
R-packages to install
install.packages(c(“tidyverse”, “tidymodels”))
install.packages(c(“glmnet”, “rpart”, “randomForest”))
install.packages(c(“xgboost”, “nnet”))
install.packages(c(“corrplot”, “rpart.plot”, “vip”))
install.packages(c(“parallel”, “doParallel”, “tidyclust”))

Dates & Schedule

Online live sessions on January 8th, 15th, 22nd, and 29th, 2027.

From 16:00 to 19:30 (Madrid time zone).

Total course hours: 22
14 hours of online live lessons, plus 8 hours of independent work on exercises.

This course is equivalent to 1 ECTS (European Credit Transfer System) at the Life Science Zurich Graduate School. The recognition of ECTS by other institutions depends on each university or school.

Format

In the live sessions we will combine online lectures with hands-on computational exercises in R.

Live sessions will be recorded. However, attendance to the live sessions is required to obtain the course certificate.

This course will be delivered in English.

Instructor

Nicolas Attalides instructor for Transmitting Science

Dr. Nicolas Attalides
Freelance
UK

Registration Fees

  • Course Fee
  • {{content-1}}
  • Early bird (until October 31st, 2026):
  • {{content-3}}
  • 546 €
    (436.80 € for Ambassador Institutions)
  • {{content-5}}
  • Regular (after October 31st, 2026):
  • {{content-7}}
  • 610 €
    (488 € for Ambassador Institutions)
  • {{content-9}}
  • Prices include VAT.
    After registration you will receive confirmation of your acceptance on the course.
    Payment is not required during registration. Check discounts here.

Registration

We care about your privacy. If you require more information about the processing of your personal data and your rights, please read our privacy policy (below).

Organiser

Logo Transmitting Science

Collaborators

Logo COBCYL
Logo COBCV
Logo COBEUSKADI
Logo COBGA