This is a pretty old article, and well before this time markov/bayesian stuff was already in full swing for bioinformatics, AFAIK. Biology draws from many disciplines, and it's taken a lot of computer science to get to where it is now. But I think that the infosec community generally is pretty underwhelming in its application of statistical methods to big data. People seem to have limited imaginations when it comes to pattern matching, and too quickly jump to heuristics and "machine learning" without properly understanding the limitations of the data and techniques they're working with.

To paraphrase provocatively, 'machine learning is statistics
minus any checking of models and assumptions'.
~Brian Ripley, 2004 [1]

We should really check out some of the stuff bioinformatics people have been doing. That's not to say that cryptography has more to give to biology, quite the contrary. But I think the broader infosec community should try harder when it comes to doing stats properly. I think there is a lot more in common between bioinformatics and infosec analytics than most (on either side) realize. Huge amounts of messy, un/semi-structured data being the common theme.

In my (admittedly limited) experience, I find that wetlab biologists tend to have a better understanding of the limitations of the experiments they're setting up, in terms of interpreting the significance, limitations and meaning of their results at least - than the computer science types playing in biology. But good stats is the one universal skill that all good scientists should master.

I spent a few years where part of my work was supporting evolutionary geneticists manage and figure out their data. Enormous amounts of data. So much raw data that the very large scientific institution I'm sure you've heard of couldn't accommodate it in their normal data repositories (at least not if every researcher started doing so). Having multi-million dollar research projects conclude and then archived to a handful of redundant sets of HDDs curated by teams and departments that now no longer exist is unnerving (supposedly things are better these days).

In any case, it's a fascinating area to work in for budding computer scientists. There are many problems to sink your teeth into, even basic stuff like repeatable analyses on research projects running for more than 10-15 years. "Yes, there are faster/more robust/more appropriate MCMV (Markov Chain Monte Carlo) solutions out there but we don't feel like re-running a decade's worth of work to ensure they're comparable". But I digress.

It amused me that each research team seemed to be either computer-science heavy (and ignorant about the quality or nature or "ground truth" of their data and the possibly embarrassing impacts on the signals they thought they were seeing), almost wilfully ignorant or at least dismissive of "old-school" biology methods and data...

... or were very wet-lab savvy and grounded in the raw biology side of things but limited their research questions according to the types of analyses they were comfortable doing themselves, using well-established methods, tools and software that would run on their biggest $20k PC under someone's desk. Although that was seriously changing by 2013 when I left (partly due to nice big web-UIs in front of HPC clusters, partly due to better mixing of team capabilities).

Now, it's easy to dismiss the latter group as just being not "up to date" or unskilled in "big data" (recent biology grad programmes are hopefully improving). But what was surprising was the obvious opportunities (to me) that highly CS-capable teams (inside and outside of the organisation I worked for) seemed to be deliberately staying away from. On more than one occasion I asked some of these people why they were ignoring the rich, machine-readable, highly-curated datasets from more traditional biology science (Eg. taxonomy/ID/phenotype/ecology info).

The answers are varied: they aren't even aware this data exists in machine-readable form; they seem unfamiliar with the very biology discipline they're playing in (they're more obsessed with algorithms); but a disturbing trend seemed to be a generic distrust of manually curated data. I guess because there's no repeatable algorithms to reproduce human curators :-)

Now, I'm not saying everyone should go out and use that data as a source of truth, but it should at least be a reference to sanity-check or compare to. And imagine if you actually did augment your sequence data with this stuff - one (admittedly naieve) thought was that there might be a fun way to look for at least some phenotype influences in a given genome, "for free", without having to start new wetlab work - i.e. just repurpose existing data.

When countering the aversion to manually curated data, I tried to point out that the very "garbage in" being dealt with - the genome sequences, spatial records, environmental layers etc. - all involve an element of human curation. I mean, that's how we end up with nearly 20% of non-human genomes containing human DNA [2] in the first place. And that's before we even consider whether stuff in the "good" 80% are even representative of the species group(s) of interest - you wouldn't believe how easy it is for people in the field (or the lab!) to get species identification completely and utterly wrong. Or scrape up DNA samples of some infection or parasite instead of the actual thing itself...

... and yet even with all these imperfections in the molecular data, we find that some of the old-school morphological (phenotype-driven) taxonomies are still 80%+ unchanged (hazy on the numbers now) when reconstructed with purely DNA-derived phylogenies. And that's on groups where we're still fighting over what the best DNA markers are to build those molecular phylogenies in the first place! A lot of people don't realize that the same DNA evidence can give different pictures of the evolutionary tree, depending on what genes you're picking on...

Apologies for the over-sized rant, it's been a while since I had to think of this stuff.

[1] http://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/6/the-two-cultures-...

[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/17/science/17genome.html