Provides a solid understanding of the fundamental concepts of probability theory and statistics. The course covers the basic probabilistic concepts such as probability space, random variables and vectors, expectation, covariance, correlation, probability distribution functions, etc. Important classes of discrete and continuous random variables, their inter-relation, and relevance to applications are discussed. Conditional probabilities, the Bayes formula, and properties of jointly distributed random variables are covered. Limit theorems, which investigate the behavior of a sum of a large number of random variables, are discussed. The main concepts random processes are then introduced. The latter part of the course concerns the basic problems of mathematical statistics, in particular, point and interval estimation and hypothesis testing.

An introduction to the data science pipeline, i.e., the end-to-end process of going from unstructured, messy data to knowledge and actionable insights. Provides a broad overview of what data science means and systems and tools commonly used for data science, and illustrates the principles of data science through several case studies.

This course provides an introduction to the different types of data generated for bioinformatics analyses and data management principles required for scientific rigor and reproducibility. Students will explore different data sources, including sequencing data, 'omics data (e.g., proteomics, metabolomics, lipidomics), imaging data, and clinical data. The course will also cover data organization through topics such as management and curation of metadata, downloading data from and submitting data to public repositories, and using databases versus spreadsheets and tables.

This course provides an in-depth coverage of biological sequence alignment. Students will explore a variety of topics, including definitions, algorithms, and statistics for local, global, pairwise, and multiple alignments; scoring schemes; BLAST, BLAST variants, and similar programs; motif finding; and related topics.

This course provides an introduction to the fundamental data structures and algorithms underlying many parts of Bioinformatics. Students will explore standard data structures for efficient indexing and sequence search, including the suffix array and the FM-index, as will alignment-free methods for sequence comparison. This course will also introduce the fundamental algorithms in computational phylogenomics and biological network analysis. Finally, students will examine bioinformatics oriented applications of classic unsupervised learning algorithms (e.g., clustering and dimensionality reduction) and database techniques (e.g., sorting, selection, joining). The focus will be both on formal understanding of computational efficiency as well as the practical applications of these concepts.