On March 3rd, 2025, BIOS2 will host a new training on hierarchical generalized additive models (HGAMs) by fellows Camille Lévesque and Katherine Hébert.
This course is designed to demystify hierarchical modelling as powerful tools to model population dynamics, spatial distributions, and any non-linear relationships in your ecological data. The training will be divided into two blocks. First, we will cover hierarchies in biology, data, and in models to understand what hierarchical models are, some of the forms they can take, and the fundamentals of how they work. Second, we will introduce latent variable modelling as a way to explain even more of the variation in our response variables, to better disentangle the hierarchies of variation in our data. Both blocks will include a theoretical presentation followed by hands-on coding exercises to implement and interpret hierarchical GAMs.
This training will be given in English, and the coding exercises will be done in R. We recommend installing R and RStudio prior to the workshop, and will send more detailed instructions about packages to install and data to download in the days before the workshop.
We recommend previous experience with GAMs before taking this training. If you would like to follow an introduction to GAMs before this workshop, please have a look at Eric Pedersen’s Introduction to GAMs and/or the Québec Centre for Biodiversity Science’s Workshop 8: GAMs.