Course Review: Udemy Bioinformatics Course

The other day I was perusing Udemy’s listing of free courses and found thBioinformatics course on offer. Since it was less than two hours and free, the only thing I had to lose was two hours of my time. I therefore embarked upon an afternoon of learning bioinformatics, as it relates to machine learning.

The course was broken down into two sections, the first one being a theoretical discussion the different libraries that can be used with the Python programming language, and the section being three mini projects:-

Section 1

Section 1 is an introduction. It discusses what bioinformatics is and also general python and sklearn topics that are specific to this genre. The library that is specific to this course is biopython.

Section 2

Section 2 of the course is composed of three projects the student is expected to complete.

Project 1 and project 2 are composed of a basic Python sequence. The course author obviously knows a lot about bioinformatics, which is why he was able to write the code in straight Python.

Project 2 is a sequence analysis involving Biopython. Biopython is supposed to be easier to use than the other libraries in Python, but I have been unable to find the functions that go with this library.

I feel that a person needs to be well versed in Bioinformatics in order to successfully complete project 1 and project 2.

Project 3 is an example of bioinformatics using a dataset in Kaggle. I made predictions on the dataset and the link to the post I wrote can be found here:- https://tracyrenee61.medium.com/how-i-used-gridsearchcv-to-score-100-accuracy-on-a-bioinformatics-dataset-f87ac48f4b56?sk=8f4298daa8b6e4047329d0023184ed74

In conclusion, I am glad I took the course, but I did not learn as much about bioinformatics as I would have liked to. A person will need to know about bioinformatics before he can code from scratch or use the biopython library. I was not able to find a lot of documentation on biopython, so it was difficult for me to use. Since the sklearn library is so informative, i just stuck with that library, which is what I have the greatest competency in.