Analyze Data -- 2

Know what your real sample size is. It can be easy to be tricked by the size of a data set. Imagine you have an image of a simple black circle on a white background stored as pixels. As the resolution increases the size of the data increases, but the amount of information may not (hence vector graphics). Similarly in genomics, the number of reads you measure (which is a main determinant of data size) is not the sample size, it is the number of individuals. In social networks, the number of people in the network may not be the sample size. If the network is very dense, the sample size might be much less. In general the bigger the sample size the better and sample size and data size aren’t always tightly correlated.