A field guide to cultivating computational biology.

Evolving in sync with the computation revolution over the past 30 years, computational biology has emerged as a mature scientific field. While the field has made major contributions toward improving scientific knowledge and human health, individual computational biology practitioners at various institutions often languish in career development. As optimistic biologists passionate about the future of our field, we propose solutions for both eager and reluctant individual scientists, institutions, publishers, funding agencies, and educators to fully embrace computational biology. We believe that in order to pave the way for the next generation of discoveries, we need to improve recognition for computational biologists and better align pathways of career success with pathways of scientific progress. With 10 outlined steps, we call on all adjacent fields to move away from the traditional individual, single-discipline investigator research model and embrace multidisciplinary, data-driven, team science.

ClassifyR: an R package for performance assessment of classification with applications to transcriptomics.

UNLABELLED: Although a large collection of classification software packages exist in R, a new generic framework for linking custom classification functions with classification performance measures is needed. A generic classification framework has been designed and implemented as an R package in an object oriented style. Its design places emphasis on parallel processing, reproducibility and extensibility. Finally, a comprehensive set of performance measures are available to ease post-processing. Taken together, these important characteristics enable rapid and reproducible benchmarking of alternative classifiers. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: ClassifyR is implemented in R and can be obtained from the Bioconductor project: http://bioconductor.org/packages/release/bioc/html/ClassifyR.html.