

Dates: 5-6th July 2022
Location: Swansea Bay Campus
Cost: The event, accommodation and food are free, however, there is a £50 administration fee
More and more, research requires skills in analysing large data sets. Exciting discoveries have been made using electronic health care data but working with big data can be challenging. To get the best out of your data you need to make sure you are using the latest and greatest tools and techniques in data analysis and manipulation.
The UK MS Register team at Swansea University have a unique offer for you – the chance to learn how to use these tools and test them on real-world data from the UK MS Register. The UK MS Register’s first-ever Datathon is scheduled for 5th and 6th July 2022, immediately before the MS Society’s MS Frontiers conference which is being held this year at Swansea University’s beautiful Bay Campus.
What will the course feature?
You will develop your fundamental skills in data loading, cleansing and basic manipulation within small collaborative groups with support and guidance from the UK MS Register team. From there you’ll progress to more advanced techniques for linking datasets and learn methods for producing descriptive statistics. Finally, you’ll proceed to more advanced statistical analyses tasks such as time to event analysis or multivariable linear regression modelling.
This course will be taught in the R language, giving you valuable skills in this core, free, language that is used extensively in data science and medicine.
By the end of the course, you will be let loose on selected, appropriate anonymised datasets from the UK MS Register to test your newly developed R skills.
The course will feature taught and small collaborative work sessions where attendees have the chance to learn about data analysis using the large and varied dataset that is the UK MS Register.
Day One includes introductions to health informatics and linked datasets, fundamentals of the R language and analytical methods. Day Two includes more teaching and a chance to work on a particular question/aspect/idea using anonymised UK MS Register Data. As part of day two, attendees will work on producing a poster within their group, to be displayed at MS Frontiers 2022 in our own Datathon poster category. Posters will be judged by an MS Frontiers committee and prizes awarded.
Find out more about the Datathon and how to apply on the UK MS Register website