Anscombe’s quartet comprises four datasets that have nearly identical simple statistical properties, yet appear very different when graphed. Each dataset consists of eleven (x,y) points. They were constructed in 1973 by the statistician Francis Anscombe to demonstrate both the importance of graphing data before analyzing it and the effect ... [Read more...]

Joanna Zhao’s and Jenny Bryan’s R graph catalog is meant to be a complement to the physical book, Creating More Effective Graphs, but it’s a really nice gallery in its own right. The catalog shows a series of different data visualizations, all made with R and ggplot2. ... [Read more...]

I recently learned about the microbenchmark package while browsing through Hadley’s advanced R programming book. I’ve done some quick benchmarking using system.time() in a for loop and taking the average, but the microbenchmark function in the microbenchmark package makes this much easier. Hadley gives the example of ... [Read more...]

A colleague needed some help getting Illumina BeadArray gene expression data loaded into R for data analysis with limma. Hopefully whoever ran your arrays can export the data as text files formatted as described in the code below. If so, you can import... [Read more...]

Last week I ran a one-day workshop on RNA-seq data analysis in the UVA Health Sciences Library. I set up an AWS public EC2 image with all the necessary software installed. Participants logged into AWS, launched the image, and we kicked off the morning ... [Read more...]

I talked a little bit about tidy data my recent post about dplyr, but you should really go check out Hadley’s paper on the subject. R expects inputs to data analysis procedures to be in a tidy format, but the model output objects that you get back aren’t ... [Read more...]

TL;DR? We started an R Users group, awesome community, huge turnout at first meeting, lots of potential.---I've sat through many hours of meetings where faculty lament the fact that their trainees (and the faculty themselves!) are woefully ill-prepared... [Read more...]

Data “janitor-work” The New York Times recently ran a piece on wrangling and cleaning data: “For Big-Data Scientists, ‘Janitor Work’ Is Key Hurdle to Insights” Whether you call it “janitor-work,” wrangling/munging, cleaning/cleansing/scrubbing, tidying, or something else, the article above is worth a read (even though it implicitly ... [Read more...]

Last week I taught a three-hour introduction to R workshop for life scientists at UVA's Health Sciences Library.I broke the workshop into three sections:In the first half hour or so I presented slides giving an overview of R and why R is so awesome. Du... [Read more...]

A couple of months ago I posted about how to visualize exome coverage with bedtools and R. But if you're looking to get a basic handle on genome arithmetic, take a look at Aaron Quinlan's bedtools tutorials from the 2013 CSHL course. The tutorial uses ... [Read more...]

Two years ago David Searls published an article in PLoS Comp Bio describing a series of online courses in bioinformatics. Yesterday, the same author published an updated version, "A New Online Computational Biology Curriculum," (PLoS Comput Biol 10(6):... [Read more...]

If you're doing any kind of scientific computing and not using version control, you're doing it wrong. The git version control system and GitHub, a web-based service for hosting and collaborating on git-controlled projects, have both become wildly popu... [Read more...]

I've been asked a few times how to make a so-called volcano plot from gene expression results. A volcano plot typically plots some measure of effect on the x-axis (typically the fold change) and the statistical significance on the y-axis (typically the... [Read more...]

Three years ago I wrote a blog post on how to create manhattan plots in R. After hundreds of comments pointing out bugs and other issues, I've finally cleaned up this code and turned it into an R package.The qqman R package is on CRAN: http://cran.r-project.org/... [Read more...]

I'm calling variants from exome sequencing data and I need to evaluate the efficiency of the capture and the coverage along the target regions.This sounds like a great use case for bedtools, your swiss-army knife for genomic arithmetic and interval man... [Read more...]

Software Carpentry is an international collaboration backed by Mozilla and the Sloan Foundation comprising a team of volunteers that teach computational competence and basic programming skills to scientists. In addition to a suite of online lessons, ... [Read more...]

Last month I told you about Coursera's specializations in data science, systems biology, and computing. Today I was reading Jeff Leek's blog post defending p-values and found a link to HarvardX's Data Analysis for Genomics course, taught by Rafael Iriz... [Read more...]

I first mentioned Coursera about a year ago, when I hired a new analyst in my core. This new hire came in as a very competent Python programmer with a molecular biology and microbial ecology background, but with very little experience in statistics. I got him to take Roger Peng's ... [Read more...]

Jeff Leek, biostats professor at Johns Hopkins and instructor of the Coursera Data Analysis course, recently posted on Simly Statistics this list of awesome things other people accomplished in 2013 in genomics, statistics, and data science.At risk of s... [Read more...]

I archived and analyzed all Tweets containing #GI2013 from the recent Cold Spring Harbor Genome Informatics meeting, using my previously described code.Friday was the most Tweeted day. Perhaps this was due to Lior Pachter's excellent keynote, "Stories ... [Read more...]