I’ve used ChatGPT (especially ChatGPT4) for a variety of reasons and I think it enhances my data analysis and research capabilities, although I think we have to be cautios with its output and we need to know what we are doing in order to make sense of what we are receiving. Some people say that “prompting is an ability of the future” and I agree with it. In order to best use this tool, we need to know what to ask of it.
The first reason is related to code in a programming language in which I’m less knowledgeable about. For example, I consider myself to know a lot more of Python than R and, when a package I need is missing from Python, I need to use R, so asking ChatGPT what to do helps a lot in this matter.
I also use it to improve my scietific writting. Being a non-native English speaker sometimes makes me have to think twice on what I’m writting and any possible mistakes and typos I’m making, Additionnally, I use it to check if my phrases are clear and concise.
Regarding the question on if we can feed ChatGPT tables and they can analyse it, yes, it can. In a recent update, they added the “Code Interpreter” or “Advanced Data Analysis” tool as presented below.
I think you need to have a paid subscription and enable this feature in the settings category. Here, you can give to ChatGPT a table and ask it to make something out of it. Even though I could have done it myself, I tried using this feature for the first time in my post introducing PPMI and it did a very good job. I gave to ChatGPT a table extracted from PubMed containing the number of publications related to PPMI in each year and asked it to generate the graphs you are seeing in the post (including the one based on prediction). It shows you the code it is generating to respond to your query so everything is clear.