Preparatory material & programming tools

Medical information

Regarding the medical aspects, the rare diseases that will be the focus of Rarehacks is pediatric melanoma, which is a kind of skin cancer. Here you will find an introductory description along with some Q&A. http://www.danafarberbostonchildrens.org/conditions/solid-tumors/pediatric_melanoma.aspx

Python Language

Python is the most used programming language nowadays, and that is even more important in the artificial intelligence area. Here you can find some useful links on Python, including the official Python site and some tutorial sites, including an interactive tutorial:
https://www.python.org/
https://docs.python.org/3/tutorial/
https://www.learnpython.org/

ML with Python

Python has an outstanding machine learning library with tens of methods for different tasks. It is called Scikit-learn (sklearn for friends), and the official website contains lots of code examples and reference documentation:
https://scikit-learn.org/stable/

On the other hand, as one of the main task at Rarehacks will be to develop an intelligent chatbot, specialized text processing will be needed. Python also has an excellent library of natural language processing called NLTK:
https://www.nltk.org/

R Language

R is a powerful language oriented towards data analysis and statistics. It features a wide ecosystem of specialized packages that allow to easily use most of the data analysis tools available.
Here you have the official R site, the R-Studio site (a convenient environment for R), as well as a tutorial site:
https://www.r-project.org/
https://www.rstudio.com/
https://www.statmethods.net/r-tutorial/index.html

ML with R

R philosophy is a bit different from Python’s, as they favor smaller, more specialized packages as compared with sklearn and NLTK. Some interesting packages for machine learning in R include Kernlab and Caret:
https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/kernlab/
https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/caret/

As well as package NLP for natural language processing:
https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/NLP/

There is also a very interesting free online book that teaches how to analyze data in R, you can read it here:
https://r4ds.had.co.nz/

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