Advanced Statistics for the Life Sciences MOOC Launches Today

Rafael Irizarry
2015-03-02

In In we will teach statistical techniques that are commonly used in the analysis of high-throughput data and their corresponding R implementations. In Week 1 we will explain inference in the context of high-throughput data and introduce the concept of error controlling procedures. We will describe the strengths and weakness of the Bonferroni correction, FDR and q-values. We will show how to implement these in cases in which  thousands of tests are conducted, as is typically done with genomics data. In Week 2 we will introduce the concept of mathematical distance and how it is used in exploratory data analysis, clustering, and machine learning. We will describe how techniques such as principal component analysis (PCA) and the singular value decomposition (SVD) can be used for dimension reduction in high dimensional data. During week 3 we will describe confounding, latent variables and factor analysis in the context of high dimensional data and how this relates to batch effects. We will show how to implement methods such as SVA to perform inference on data affected by batch effects. Finally, during week 4 we will show how statistical modeling, and empirical Bayes modeling in particular, are powerful techniques that greatly improve precision in high-throughput data. We will be using R code to explain concepts throughout the course. We will also be using exploratory data analysis and data visualization to motivate the techniques we teach during each week.