Summary and Help area for Week 3

Summary of Week 3 learning

We have almost reached the end of this course.

As you have seen the data visualization of variants obtained from genomic data requires a good understanding of the analysis procedures (covered in Week 1 and Week 2), but also a good sense of what data you want to use and how to display it graphically (covered in Week3).

In R and RStudio it’s possible to use either built-in functions of R, or specific functions from packages for several purposes that would greatly help when analyzing variants. You should now know how to use R to understand data structure, how to provide statistical information, how to subset the data, or how to visualize it. We also covered examples of data types to represent, why this is important, and how interpret your data quickly.

Now it’s your turn to use what you learned so far, and apply it to your own data! Of course, the data type you will choose will determine your interpretation, and this remains a personal choice, heavily depending on the message you want to convey from your work.

As you must have noticed throughout this week, the undeniable added value of R/RStudio compared to the more classical resources such as excel, is the ability to produce publication-ready graphics with extensive options and extended versatility. For this, both basic plotting functions, or more advanced functions through packages could be applied depending on the desired output.

Moreover, you now know how to ensure the reproducibility of your work, simply by writing your commands into a script. This allows you to reproduce your work at any later time point, adapt the same analysis to new datasets, and/or share your work with colleagues.

We hope the detailed instructions, links, glossaries and summaries you have been throughout this course will enable you to become skilled in your analysis and encourage you to expand knowledge further through the enormous amount of online resources available.

Although digesting all this information might seem tricky at the beginning, we are confident that there is nothing you cannot learn by doing !

Do leave your comments about the learning in this week in the comments area below. In particular, did you learn anything that will be applicable to your own practice or study?

Need help? In the comments section below, you can also leave any questions you might have about the Week 2 material and the educators and your fellow learners might be able to help.