`R` is a programming language and free software environment for statistical computing and graphics. It's not only a powerful statistical programming language but also the go-to data analysis tool for many computational genomics experts. We will explore how high-dimensional genomics datasets can be analyzed with core R packages and functions.

Large biological datasets are often too big to understand by reading numbers in a table. In DREAM-High, we will eventually use heatmaps to look for patterns in breast cancer gene expression data from patients in The Cancer Genome Atlas. A heatmap can help us ask questions such as: - Which samples look similar to each other? - Which genes behave similarly across patients? - Can visual patterns help us discover tumor subtypes? Today we will learn the same basic idea using a small practice dataset that comes with R.

First Steps with R