More data are better than less data, right? When interpreted through sophisticated analytical skills the answer could be yes. Absent these skills, analysts can be tricked by patterns in “big data” that appear by chance. This lesson presents statistical skills and knowledge to help data analysts in the life sciences to avoid some of the most common pitfalls of big data. Lesson material is derived from the HarvardX Biomedical Data Science series, part of which is published as the book Data Analysis for the Life Sciences (Irizarry & Love, 2016).
Prerequisites
This lesson assumes basic skills in the R statistical programming language and the RStudio integrated development environment.
To get started, follow the directions in the Setup tab to get access to the required software and data for this workshop.