Book Image

R Bioinformatics Cookbook

By : Dan MacLean
Book Image

R Bioinformatics Cookbook

By: Dan MacLean

Overview of this book

Handling biological data effectively requires an in-depth knowledge of machine learning techniques and computational skills, along with an understanding of how to use tools such as edgeR and DESeq. With the R Bioinformatics Cookbook, you’ll explore all this and more, tackling common and not-so-common challenges in the bioinformatics domain using real-world examples. This book will use a recipe-based approach to show you how to perform practical research and analysis in computational biology with R. You will learn how to effectively analyze your data with the latest tools in Bioconductor, ggplot, and tidyverse. The book will guide you through the essential tools in Bioconductor to help you understand and carry out protocols in RNAseq, phylogenetics, genomics, and sequence analysis. As you progress, you will get up to speed with how machine learning techniques can be used in the bioinformatics domain. You will gradually develop key computational skills such as creating reusable workflows in R Markdown and packages for code reuse. By the end of this book, you’ll have gained a solid understanding of the most important and widely used techniques in bioinformatic analysis and the tools you need to work with real biological data.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Useful Statistical and Machine Learning Methods

In bioinformatics, the statistical analysis of datasets of varied size and composition is a frequent task. R is, of course, a hugely powerful statistical language with abundant options for all sorts of tasks. In this chapter, we will focus a little on some of those useful but not so often discussed methods that, while none of them make up an analysis in and of themselves, can be powerful additions to the analyses that you likely do quite often. We'll look at recipes for simulating datasets and machine learning methods for class prediction and dimensionality reduction.

The following recipes will be covered in this chapter:

  • Correcting p-values to account for multiple hypotheses
  • Generating a simulated dataset to represent a background
  • Learning groupings within data and classifying with kNN
  • Predicting classes with random forests...