An introduction to data mining in bioinformatics
January 15th, 2007In other words, you’re a bioinformatician, and data has been dumped in your lap. Find the patterns, trend, answers, or what ever meaningful knowledge the data is hiding.
From experience, I can say that is one of the most frustrating positions to be in. Data mining is a huge field and can easily be bewildering for a beginner. However, high through-put techniques in molecular biology require, more and more, that bioinformatics is required to interpret the data. Furthermore, people working in bioinformatics generally come from computer science, or biology backgrounds. Data mining, however, involves statistics to one degree or another, which means entering a field that is may not be your strong point.
Here are some tips from my own forays in the quagmire of data mining in bioinformatics. Hopefully this will give you some guidance, and an introduction to starting.