Improvements in modern biology have led to a rapid increase in sensitivity and measurability in experiments and have reached the point where it is often impossible for a scientist alone to sort through the large volume of data that is collected from just one experiment.

For example, individual data points collected from one gene expression study can easily number in the hundreds of thousands. These types of data sets are often referred to as ‘biological big data’ and require bioinformaticians to use statistical tools to gain meaningful information from them.

In this course, part of the Bioinformatics MicroMasters program, you will learn about the R language and environment and how to use it to perform statistical analyses on biological big datasets.