"BYOD": Bring your own data

Our courses use either "synthetic" data sets to demonstrate the general principles of a data analysis methodology, or "real data" obtained from the literature. These textbook examples may appear too abstract, therefore we offer participants the option to try out their freshly acquired knowledge on their own data.

General requirements

In the interest of working efficiently with your own data in a classroom setting, please adhere to the following guidelines:

Data format

Format your data as a "comma-separated-values" (CSV) text file. Excel can export spreadsheets in CSV format easily. However, make sure your CSV file uses UNIX "newline" (\n) characters to mark the line ends. Windows uses two characters, \r\n ("carriage return" and "newline") to mark the end of a line, and Excel on the Mac still exports CSV using the legacy \r line ending that was last used in MacOS 9 in 2001.

Data size

Please bring only small data sets, e.g. not exceeding 100 observations in total. Our hands-on exercises run on a relatively small virtual machine, we do not have the capacity to work with multi-gigabyte data sets :-).

Specific requirements

Depending on the course there may be other requirements regarding the data format etc. Please refer to the individual course pages for details.