Making machine learning in science an everyday reality - SynBioBeta

A few months into my postdoc, an Excel spreadsheet dealt me quite a blow. As I was preparing to perform some statistical analyses, I made a horrifying discovery: some of my sample metadata had been incorrectly merged into a single Excel spreadsheet. The metadata had to be fixed, and all of the preliminary analyses I had done had to be repeated. Sadly, even after fixing my metadata, the dataset was unsalvageable. Not enough samples had been collected and categorical metadata were missing for some samples -- there were no statistical tests I could do to identify any meaningful patterns.