Forum:Freshman puzzled by tons of statistic methods

Question

[Hughie]

Hello everyone!

I'm a freshman of bioinformatics and I'm at first year of master degree, I got a lot of troubles when learning.

1. I want to ask whether I need to know every statistic methods when using a new packages? although it seems important when fine-tune the parameters, I got in trouble when understand these methods, can you share me your growth experience in statistics learning? and I will appreciate if you can recommend some resources.
2. There are lots of parameters of each packages, how can you distinguish which combination is the best?

I can think of some of my troubles at present, thanks in advance!

Answer 1

[WouterDeCoster]

In my opinion, there are two parts in being a bioinformatician. Either you are a developer of tools or a user. Depending on the project you are playing either of these roles. When you are being the developer you have to be aware of every detail and every statistic methods. When you are a user, you need to grasp what you are doing, in order to interpret the results correctly. But it is not vital that you understand the finest detail of your method.

With regard to parameters: if a tool is well-developed, then the "default settings" should be the most appropriate for typical use-cases. That's unfortunately not always the case...

[natasha.sernova]

It's a very good place to ask questions.

Go to the upper left corner of the page, find 'LATEST', press the button and

insert a few words to the empty line in the middle. I've found rather old post

(in the bottom), but there will be a lot of them, try.

When you see an interesting title, press it - go inside.

Also look at the right panel after - there are similar topics. See a couple of examples below.

A: Good Books And Resources For Figuring Out Biostatistics?

Statistics Advice

There are many books and tools mentioned inside .