Python for Bioinformatics

5 Statistics

Many types of analyses in bioinformatics involve the use of statistical measures. Quite often these are simple algorithms. This chapter will review basic statistics that are common in the field. This will include analysis of distributions, probabilities, multi-variant statistics, and analysis of multiple distributions.

Statistics, of course, is an extensive field, and this chapter covers only some of the basic topics that are common in bioinformatics algorithms. More in depth analysis techniques are certainly available for readers who are interested in delving deeper into this topic.

5.1 Simple Statistics

Given a vector of numbers, the most common statistical measure is to compute the average of the numbers. Code 5-1 demonstrates ...