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)

Learning groups in data without prior information

It is common in bioinformatics to want to classify things into groups without first knowing what or how many groups there may be. This process is usually known as clustering and is a type of unsupervised machine learning. A common place for this approach is in genomics experiments, particularly RNAseq and related expression technologies. In this recipe, we'll start with a large gene expression dataset of around 150 samples, learn how to estimate how many groups of samples there are, and apply a method to cluster them based on the reduction of dimensionality with Principal Component Analysis (PCA), followed by a k-means cluster.

Getting ready

For this recipe, we'll...