Statistical Learning in Genetics: An Introduction Using R, Edition 2

This book is addressed to numerate biologists who may lack the formal mathematical background of the professional statistician. For this reason, considerably more detailed explanations and derivations are offered. Examples are used profusely and a large proportion involves programming with the open-source package R. The code needed to solve the exercises is provided and it can be downloaded, allowing students to experiment by running the programs on their own computer.

Part I presents methods of inference and computation that are appropriate for likelihood and Bayesian models. Part II discusses prediction for continuous and binary data using both frequentist and Bayesian approaches. Some of the models used for prediction are also used for gene discovery. The challenge is to find promising genes without incurring a large proportion of false positive results. Therefore, Part II includes a detour on the False Discovery Rate, assuming frequentist and Bayesian perspectives. The last chapter of Part II provides an overview of a selected number of non-parametric methods. Part III consists of exercises and their solutions. This second edition has benefited from many clarifications and extensions of themes discussed in the first edition.

Daniel Sorensen holds PhD and DSc degrees from the University of Edinburgh and is an elected Fellow of the American Statistical Association. He was professor of Statistical Genetics at Aarhus University where, at present, he is professor emeritus.