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Wednesday, July 17, 2013

Computational Competence for Biologists

After reading this post http://software-carpentry.org/blog/2013/07/computational-competence-for-biologists.html, I realized that I am far from being competent....

currently, I know some python, R(bioconductor), linux commands, sed, awk, galaxy and feel comfortable  to use command line based software like bedtools, samtools, bowtie etc. I still need to enhance my database skills though. More importantly, I will need to have some statistics knowledge.
I signed up for

Mathematical Biostatistics Boot Camp 1


a demonstration of the need to have good statistics knowledge:
Simon Anders from EMBL has very good slides about statistics behind RNA-seq analysis.


I quite agree that bioinformatics is pretty much about visualizing the data and finding patterns. So, I will need to master skills to clean data, transform data and visualize them. R has very good packages to generate figures and matplotlib from python is also worth learning. Sometimes, I am confused with R and python pandas package. manipulations of matrix and dataframe in these two different languages are somewhat similar but still different...I have to switch my thinking mode back and forth....

Anyway, I still have a long way to go, and I know I can not learn everything, but I can learn anything that I need at that moment. 



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