UBC DASH and DSI are Collaborating to Deliver MEDI 504B

January 6, 2025 - February 26, 2025 | M/W; 1pm - 3pm, In-person at DHCC 10207

MEDI504 is a Special Topics course designed to develop literacy and conceptual understanding of data science to enable effective collaboration with data scientists as related to health research spanning the basic, clinical, population and health services.

UBC Calendar

Course Information

Dates: January 6, 2025 - February 26, 2024

Time: Monday and Wednesday; 1:00pm - 3:00pm

Location: In-person at DHCC 10207 (2775 Laurel St, Vancouver, BC V5Z 1M9, Room 10207) 

Credit: 1.5

Pre-requisite: STAT 545A Exploratory Data Analysis

*Pre-requisite exemption requests will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. For more information, please contact the program office (medi.exptlmed@ubc.ca).

Learning Outcomes

This course targets students who are interested in how medical care can be transformed by “Big data”. The instructors will use real-life clinical use cases to motivate how clinical care can be enhanced by collecting unconventional data of various kinds and feeding such data to machine learning methods to build next-generation clinical tools. However, even with the appropriate data collected, the teaching team will describe the data science challenges that need to be overcome before the data can be used properly. This course will introduce the main concepts and methods in biostatistics, and machine learning, including unsupervised and supervised methods, and data visualization. Last but not least, there will be discussion of ethical issues, fairness issues, and other potential pitfalls of applying machine learning to medical care. 

The four major learning outcomes for the students are: 

  1. Understand the fundamental concepts of machine learning and predictive modeling.
  2. Apply data science processes and project management techniques to biomedical datasets.
  3. Perform exploratory data analysis (EDA) and create user stories for data science projects.
  4. Develop and evaluate logistic regression models and other machine learning techniques.

Topics Schedule

Week 1

Foundations of Predictive Modelling

EDA in Practice and User Stories

Week 2

Logistic Regression

Missing Data & Class Imbalance

Week 3

Feature Selection

Regularization

Week 4

Trees & Forests

Boosting

Week 5

BREAK (No Class)

Week 6

Discrimination & Calibration

Net Benefit

Week 7

MIDTERM BREAK (No Class)

Week 8

Deep Learning

Convolutional Neural Networks

Course Instructors

Dr. Aline Talhouk, 

Assistant Professor

Obstetrics & Gynecology

a.talhouk@ubc.ca


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