About
About the instructor
Federica Gazzelloni is an actuary, statistician, data scientist, author and instructor whose work spans health metrics, actuarial modelling, R and Python, data visualisation and reproducible research. She leads R-Ladies Rome and the Rome R Users Group, and she brings that practical, collaborative style to the workshop materials in this repository.
This experience connects directly to the workshop’s practical approach to machine learning in epidemiology: we start with a clear understanding of the modelling problem, keep the code and data workflow reproducible, and explain how model choices relate to the epidemiological question being asked.
The two-part learning journey
This workshop is designed as a guided progression through two connected learning experiences:
- Part 1 — September 2026: foundations of machine learning, the idea of learning itself, gradient descent, and a West Nile virus prediction workflow.
- Part 2 — 23 October 2026: a heart-disease workflow inspired by Wright et al., including trees, neural networks, evaluation, resampling and tuning.
The materials are organised so that participants can move from conceptual understanding to code-based practice without losing sight of the data, the modelling assumptions and the interpretation of results.
Workshop materials and next steps
The repository keeps the two session tracks easy to navigate while preserving the source files, notebook structure and project-level working directories.
This new repository is a workshop organization and teaching resource for the current series. The original September repository and published website remain separate and are not replaced by these materials.