Customer Reviews

Statistical Methods in Bioinformatics: An Introduction (Statistics for Biology and Health)

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4 star:		(1)
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I was impressed with the 1st edition of this book for its most comprehensive and elegant of statistical techniques in bioinformatics. The book is slightly below the level of the now classic M S Waterman (1995)book:Introduction to Computational Biology: Maps, Sequences and Genomes (Interdisciplinary Statistics). But this book is more update in some areas and has much more background materials on probability and statistics, which should provide a solid basis for understanding bioinformatics. Its pedagorical sense is unparalleled. It would make a very good choice for a stat/math oriented introduction to bioinformatics (as opposed to algorithimc/database oriented approach in cs).

I'm a Statistics PhD student so you can condition on my prior to get at what's really going on with this book.

Bioinformatics is a departure from "regular" statistics and looks awfully messy at first pass. The sorts of assumptions one typically makes in other areas of statistical inference are patently false, so new techniques and intuitions have to be built up in order to attack these kinds of problems. This book does an excellent job of balancing the technical details with the necessary intuitions so one can really get a firm grasp on what's going on.

I wouldn't recommend this book to someone who hasn't done statistics at at least an advanced undergrad level (e.g., comfortable with Probability at the Ross-level and Statistical Inference at the Casella/Berger-level). But for people really interested in the material and coming from a solid statistical background the book is an excellent resource.

I would also strongly recommend it to teach out of.

This is a useful book for people who have some background in probability and statistics to understand methods in bioinformatics. The chapter on BLAST theory is useful, as not too many books talk about it. Newcomers into the field who have absolutely no math background may find it hard to understand, though - definitely not a book for the beginner.

USUALLY I am very positive in my responses. But this gibberish:

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COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL
Warren J. Ewens, Gregory Grant. Statistical Methods in Bioinformatics: An Introduction (Statistics for Biology and Health). (Springer, 2005). Page 231.

is what you get when you (pay for) the digital copy and want to use your (secret number of) copy privileges. Your print privileges - to print out the page - are limited as well and you do not know ahead of time what that limit is. It seems to be 0. Which should not be sold as a print privilege. The annotations come out in this same weird encoding and the "Report a Problem" link has been irritating me since I first tried April 17 when I purchased this article. I wanted to report that the text is dim and fuzzy, very difficult for reading online, so I filled out the "Report a problem" form. I spent time filling it out. The response was that "We know this doesn't work and we are working on it and try again later". That was April 17. Still happening. There is no place to rate the digital service.

I gave up and wrote regular Amazon customer service.
Amazon customer service refunded the price of the digital subscription.