Description: If you are a biologist and want to get the best out of the powerful methods of modern computational statistics, this is your book. You can visualize and analyze your own data, apply unsupervised and supervised learning, integrate datasets, apply hypothesis testing, and make publication-quality figures using the power of R/Bioconductor and ggplot2. This book will teach you 'cooking from scratch', from raw data to beautiful illuminating output, as you learn to write your own scripts in the R language and to use advanced statistics packages from CRAN and Bioconductor. It covers a broad range of basic and advanced topics important in the analysis of high-throughput biological data, including principal component analysis and multidimensional scaling, clustering, multiple testing, unsupervised and supervised learning, resampling, the pitfalls of experimental design, and power simulations using Monte Carlo, and it even reaches networks, trees, spatial statistics, image data, and microbial ecology. Using a minimum of mathematical notation, it builds understanding from well-chosen examples, simulation, visualization, and above all hands-on interaction with data and code.
Brief description: Susan Holmes is Professor of Statistics at Stanford University, California. She specializes in exploring and visualizing multidomain biological data, using computational statistics to draw inferences in microbiology, immunology and cancer biology. She has published over 100 research papers, and has been a key developer of software for the multivariate analyses of complex heterogeneous data. She was the Breiman Lecturer at NIPS 2016, has been named a Fields Institute fellow, and is currently a fellow at the Center for the Advances Study of the Behavioral Sciences.
Review Quotes: '... the book is extremely readable and engaging, it explains complicated concepts in simple terms, and uses illuminating graphics and examples. Any researcher who wants to learn or teach up-to-date statistics to biologists will find this an essential volume for modern teaching of modern statistics to modern biologists.' Noa Pinter-Wollman, The Quarterly Review of Biology