Statistical Analysis
From Wikionchus
Although spreadsheet software like Microsoft Excel can be used for many of the statistical analysis, its use is advised against, for the following good reasons:
- Free will : Excel has a mind of its own and can change data WITHOUT any warning. e.g see the paper by Zeeberg et al "Mistaken Identifiers: Gene name errors can be introduced inadvertently when using Excel in bioinformatics" : http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2105/5/80
- Loss of precision : Excel is known to make numerical mistakes! A good example is http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/~jcryer/JSMTalk2001.pdf
- Many simple operations are not even possible in Excel : e.g there is no way to make a simple box and whisker plot !
The R software
The statistical package R provides a versatile, free and open source software environment for statistical computing and graphics. It compiles and runs on a wide variety of UNIX platforms, Windows and MacOS.
One can find widely tested and trusted tools / packages for even advanced tasks such as QTL mapping, microarray data analysis, survival analysis etc.
Also see http://www.bioconductor.org/
