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Five things Biologists should know about Statistics

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In a thoughtful blog post, Bioinformatician Ewan Birney (Head of Nucleotide Data at the European Bioinformatics Institute) talks about the importance of Statistics to biologists:

Biology is really about stats. Indeed, the foundation of much of frequentist statistics – RA Fisher and colleagues – were totally motivated by biological problems.

He also cites the "Five statistical things I wished I had been taught 20 years ago". In order, they are:

  1. Non-parametric statistics
  2. R
  3. The problem of multiple testing
  4. The relationship between P-value, effect size, and sample size, and
  5. Linear models and PCA

Read Ewan's full post at the link below for his reasons why every biologist should learn about these five statistical things.

Bioinformatician at Large: Five statistical things I wished I had been taught 20 years ago (via @paulblaser)

 

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