BOL: Related items

Import R Data

Abhimanyu Singh — Wed, 12 Jul 2017 08:30:46 -0500

It is often necessary to import sample textbook data into R before you start working on your homework.

Excel File

Quite frequently, the sample data is in Excel format, and needs to be imported into R prior to use. For this, we can use the function read.xls from the gdata package. It reads from an Excel spreadsheet and returns a data frame. The following shows how to load an Excel spreadsheet named "mydata.xls". This method requires Perl runtime to be present in the system.

> library(gdata)                   # load gdata package
> help(read.xls)                   # documentation
> mydata = read.xls("mydata.xls")  # read from first sheet

Alternatively, we can use the function loadWorkbook from the XLConnect package to read the entire workbook, and then load the worksheets with readWorksheet. The XLConnect package requires Java to be pre-installed.

> library(XLConnect) # load XLConnect package
> wk = loadWorkbook("mydata.xls")
> df = readWorksheet(wk, sheet="Sheet1")

Minitab File

If the data file is in Minitab Portable Worksheet format, it can be opened with the function read.mtp from the foreign package. It returns a list of components in the Minitab worksheet.

> library(foreign)                 # load the foreign package
> help(read.mtp)                   # documentation
> mydata = read.mtp("mydata.mtp")  # read from .mtp file

SPSS File

For the data files in SPSS format, it can be opened with the function read.spss also from the foreign package. There is a "to.data.frame" option for choosing whether a data frame is to be returned. By default, it returns a list of components instead.

> library(foreign) # load the foreign package
> help(read.spss) # documentation
> mydata = read.spss("myfile", to.data.frame=TRUE)

Table File

A data table can resides in a text file. The cells inside the table are separated by blank characters. Here is an example of a table with 4 rows and 3 columns.

100   a1   b1
200   a2   b2
300   a3   b3
400   a4   b4

Now copy and paste the table above in a file named "mydata.txt" with a text editor. Then load the data into the workspace with the function read.table.

> mydata = read.table("mydata.txt")  # read text file
> mydata                             # print data frame
   V1 V2 V3
1 100 a1 b1
2 200 a2 b2
3 300 a3 b3
4 400 a4 b4

For further detail of the function read.table, please consult the R documentation.

> help(read.table)

CSV File

The sample data can also be in comma separated values (CSV) format. Each cell inside such data file is separated by a special character, which usually is a comma, although other characters can be used as well.

The first row of the data file should contain the column names instead of the actual data. Here is a sample of the expected format.

Col1,Col2,Col3
100,a1,b1
200,a2,b2
300,a3,b3

After we copy and paste the data above in a file named "mydata.csv" with a text editor, we can read the data with the function read.csv.

> mydata = read.csv("mydata.csv")  # read csv file
> mydata
  Col1 Col2 Col3
1  100   a1   b1
2  200   a2   b2
3  300   a3   b3

In various European locales, as the comma character serves as the decimal point, the function read.csv2 should be used instead. For further detail of the read.csv and read.csv2 functions, please consult the R documentation.

> help(read.csv)

Working Directory

Finally, the code samples above assume the data files are located in the R working directory, which can be found with the function getwd.

> getwd() # get current working directory

You can select a different working directory with the function setwd(), and thus avoid entering the full path of the data files.

> setwd("") # set working directory

Note that the forward slash should be used as the path separator even on Windows platform.

> setwd("C:/MyDoc")

MinION_GC: An R script to do some QC on MinION data

Radha Agarkar — Sun, 03 Dec 2017 15:19:18 -0600

Other tools focus on getting data out of the fastq or fast5 files, which is slow and computationally intensive. The benefit of this approach is that it works on a single, small, .txt summary file. So it's a lot quicker than most other things out there: it takes about a minute to analyse a 4GB flowcell on my laptop.

https://github.com/roblanf/minion_qc

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/roblanf/minion_qc

R 3.5.0 has been Released!

Jit — Thu, 26 Apr 2018 11:31:58 -0500

The latest version of R is a major release! It comes with a ton of new features, including performance and speed improvements
All R packages will now be byte-compiled, hence boosting packages installed from GitHub
You may need to re-install all previously installed R packages; old scripts however will continue to work normally

More at https://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/r-release/NEWS.html

Julia Programming Language, a Python and R rival

Radha Agarkar — Sat, 25 Aug 2018 04:46:39 -0500

Big data has grown to become one of the most lucrative fields. In fact, data scientists are some of the most sought people. They are usually hired to analyze, control and parse large chunks of data. Implementing these actions using traditional techniques is not a walk in the park. This is why most data scientists prefer using programming languages such as R and Python. However, there is one more programming language that can do the job. That is Julia programming language.

What Is Julia Language?

Julia is a programming language that came into the limelight in 2012. It is a general-purpose programming language that was designed for solving scientific computations. Julia was meant to be an alternative to Python, R and other programming languages that were mainly used for manipulating data. This is because it has numerous features that can minimize the complexities of numerical computations.

Julia optimizes on the best features of Python and R while at the same time overlooks their weaknesses. This explains why it is viewed as an alternative to these programming languages. For instance, it utilizes the readability and simplicity of Python then performs faster.

Julia is the most preferred programming language for data scientists and mathematicians. This is because its core features are similar to the ones that are used on most data software. Also, the language is ideal for these two subjects because its syntax is similar to the standard mathematical formulas.

Key Features Of Julia Language
Uses JIT Compilation
Parallelism
Dynamic Typing
Simple Syntax
Allows Metaprogramming
Accessible to Libraries
-1-Array Indexing

Julia Vs Python And R Programming Languages
1. Speed
Julia is faster than both Python and R. This is a very critical aspect that is given special attention in the big data programming. The high speed of Julia is because of JIT compilers. You will need to install external libraries on Python to achieve similar speed.

2. Syntax
Julia has a math-friendly syntax. The syntax of this programming language is similar to the mathematical formulas hence can be used to perform mathematical and scientific computations. This syntax makes it easier to learn than Python.

3. Parallelism
Although both Python and R use parallelism, Julia uses a top-level parallelism. Julia allows the processor to perform to the optimum level than what Python and R can achieve.

4. Versatility
Julia programming language is more versatile than Python and R. It allows a programmer to move from different codes and functions with ease.

The only area that Python and R are superior to Julia is in terms of community. Given that Julia is a new programming language, it has a small community as compared to others which have been around for years.

In overall Julia programming language is a better alternative that you can use to handle Big data projects. Despite having a small community, it is one of those programming languages that you can easily learn.

visNetwork: an R package for network visualization, using vis.js javascript library

Jit — Wed, 09 Jan 2019 11:00:32 -0600

visNetwork is an R package for network visualization, using vis.js javascript library (http://visjs.org/). All remarks and bugs are welcome on github : https://github.com/datastorm-open/visNetwork.

Features

Based on htmlwidgets, so :

compatible with shiny, R Markdown documents, and RStudio viewer

The package proposes all the features available in vis.js API, and even more with special features for R :

easy to use
custom shapes, styles, colors, sizes, …
works smooth on any modern browser for up to a few thousand nodes and edges
interactivity controls (highlight, collapsed nodes, selection, zoom, physics, movement of nodes, tooltip, events, …)
visualize rpart tree

Address of the bookmark: https://datastorm-open.github.io/visNetwork/

GeneOverlap: An R package to test and visualize gene overlaps

Jit — Thu, 27 Dec 2018 19:45:52 -0600

Overlapping gene lists can reveal biological meanings and may lead to novel hypotheses. For example, histone modification is an important cellular mechanism that can pack and re-pack chromatin. By making the chromatin structure more dense or loose, the gene expression can be turned on or off. Tri-methylation on lysine 4 of histone H3 (H3K4me3) is associated with gene activation and its genome-wide enrichment can be mapped by using ChIP-seq experiments. Because of its activating role, if we overlap the genes that are bound by H3K4me3 with the genes that are highly expressed, we should expect a positive association. Similary, we can perform such kind of overlapping between the gene lists of different histone modifications with that of various expression groups and establish each histone modification’s role in gene regulation.

Address of the bookmark: https://bioconductor.org/packages/release/bioc/vignettes/GeneOverlap/inst/doc/GeneOverlap.pdf

chromoMap-An R package for Interactive Visualization and Annotation of Chromosomes

Jit — Sat, 07 Sep 2019 10:45:31 -0500

chromoMap provides interactive, configurable and elegant graphics visualization of chromosomes or chromosomal regions allowing users to map chromosome elements (like genes,SNPs etc.) on the chromosome plot.Each chromosome is composed of loci(representing a specific range determined based on chromosome length) that, on hover, shows details about the annotations in that locus range. The plots can be saved as HTML documents that can be shared easily. In addition, you can include them in R Markdown or in R Shiny applications.

Some of the prominent features of the package are:

visualizing polyploidy simultaneously on the same plot.
annotating groups of elements as distinct colors.
creating chromosome heatmaps.
adjusting chromosome range or visualizing chromosome regions such as genes
adding labels to the plot
adding hyperlinks to each element

Address of the bookmark: https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/chromoMap/vignettes/chromoMap.html

Github replacement !

Rahul Nayak — Thu, 26 Sep 2019 03:42:39 -0500

For a number of reasons researchers have been trying out GitLab as a replacement for for both GitHub and various continuous integration systems, and have been exploring configurations useful for model-fitting pipelines. Researchers turned one of these into an example repository that shows how to use GitLab together with the Rocker Docker images and the drake build system to reproducibly run a project pipeline, using the cacheing functionality across all three tools to make things reasonably speedy and enable both local and remote builds.

Check it out at https://gitlab.com/ecohealthalliance/drake-gitlab-docker-example.

Scientist Bioinformatics Positions

Thu, 30 Jan 2020 06:53:40 -0600

Bioinformatics-Multi_Omics_Integration

https://www.researchgate.net/job/939073_Senior_Scientist_Bioinformatics-Multi_Omics_Integration

Senior_Scientist_Bioinformatics-Transcriptomics_Analysis

https://www.researchgate.net/job/939075_Senior_Scientist_Bioinformatics-Transcriptomics_Analysis-Belgium_France_Switzerland_The_Netherlands

Senior Scientist Bioinformatics - Network Analytics

https://www.researchgate.net/job/939070_Senior_Scientist_Bioinformatics-Network_Analytics_Belgium_France_Switzerland_the_Netherlands

Team Leader Bioinformatics Data Sciences - Mechelen, Belgium

https://www.researchgate.net/job/938787_Team_Leader_Bioinformatics_Data_Sciences-Mechelen_Belgium

GeneMates: an R package for Detecting Horizontal Gene Co-transfer between Bacteria Using Gene-gene Associations Controlled for Population Structure

Rahul Nayak — Sat, 07 Mar 2020 05:52:20 -0600

GeneMates is an R package implementing a network approach to identify horizontal gene co-transfer (HGcoT) between bacteria using whole-genome sequencing (WGS) data. It is particularly useful for investigating intra-species HGcoT, where presence-absence status of acquired genes is usually confounded by bacterial population structure due to clonal reproduction.

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.29.970970v1

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/wanyuac/GeneMates