11.7 Next steps

OMG there’s more?? I know, right, you’re so lucky. In the first 11 chapters of this book we focused on learning how to use R, how to fit statistical models that represent biological hypotheses, how to assess whether those methods are valid for the data collected, how to make predictions about phenomena of interest from our models, and now how to choose between multiple competing models. All of this has relied heavily on assumptions of linear models. Fundamental among those assumptions is that our response variables of interest (and their residuals) conform to the normal distribution. In Chapter 12, we will free ourselves of those shackles by stepping into the world of generalized linear models.