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Forum: If I want to learn bioinformatics as a computer scientist, would it help to learn Data science and Machine Learning first?

To be more specific, I would like to write my undergraduate thesis on bioinformatics as a Computer Science student, but I'm feeling overwhelmed by all these books focusing on biology aspects.

I find a few books which discuss computational algorithms extensively, but unfortunately, they weren't very beginner-friendly. Bioinformatics online courses are even scarcer.

Given these facts, I have two questions:

  1. Do you think it would be a good idea to enroll in some Data Science and Machine Learning courses first? I know there are plenty of resources for these and I think about learning some general techniques, only then applying them to the bioinformatics field.

  2. Is there a problem if I prefer to write the code in a specific programming language (most often Python) instead of pseudocode?

computer-scientist machine-learning
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updated by Ram Ram • written by bianca.iii99 • bianca.iii99

2 answers

Get a supervisor. This is nothing you can do all by yourself and nothing strangers on the internet should advise you on. Many threads on this already, please use the search function.

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updated by Ram Ram • written by ATpoint ATpoint
  1. No, if the biology side of things is unfamiliar then you need some biology classes. Bioinformatics is a mixture of biology, statistics and CS. You need at least a passing familiarity with 2 of those.
  2. You'd need to ask whoever is in charge of approving theses.

As ATpoint mentioned, an advisor of some sort is invaluable at this point in your education.

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written by Devon Ryan Devon Ryan

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