Introduction to Data Science for Dairy Vets

Abstract

Attended by a group of practising and industry veterinarians at a national cattle veterinary conference, this session was specifically targeted at those with no prior knowledge of statistics, data science or coding, but with an interest in its potential. After a brief illustration of the dangers of superficial data exploration, and an interactive illustration of the effects of lag, momentum, bias and variation, attendees logged into a workspace hosted in Posit Cloud, an online Data Science platform. The attendees could step through, run, and alter the code to reproduce analyses. The session aimed to offer some general familiarity with the tools used in Data Science, and to demonstrate how simple bespoke analysis, visualisation and even advanced Bayesian modelling can be used to solve any farm problem, rather than being restricted by the available farm or veterinary software packages.