In a thoughtful blog post, Bioinformatician Ewan Birney (Head of Nucleotide Data at the European Bioinformatics Institute) talks about the importance of Statistics to biologists:
Biology is really about stats. Indeed, the foundation of much of frequentist statistics - RA Fisher and colleagues - were totally motivated by biological problems.
He also cites the "Five statistical things I wished I had been taught 20 years ago". In order, they are:
- Non-parametric statistics
- R
- The problem of multiple testing
- The relationship between P-value, effect size, and sample size, and
- Linear models and PCA
Read Ewan's full post at the link below for his reasons why every biologist should learn about these five statistical things.
Bioinformatician at Large: Five statistical things I wished I had been taught 20 years ago (via @paulblaser)
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