Authors:
Christine Nardini
1
;
Luca Benini
1
and
Michael D. Kuo
2
Affiliations:
1
DEIS, University of Bologna, Italy
;
2
UCSD Medical Center HillCrest, United States
Keyword(s):
Statistical testing, statistical significance, multiple hypothesis testing, false discovery rate, statistical resampling methods, statistical meta-analysis, omic data.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Bioinformatics
;
Biomedical Engineering
;
Biomedical Signal Processing
Abstract:
The post-Genomic Era is characterized by the proliferation of high-throughput platforms that allow the parallel study of a complete body of molecules in one single run of experiments (omic approach). Analysis and integration of omic data represent one of the most challenging frontiers for all the disciplines related to Systems Biology. From the computational perspective this requires, among others, the massive use of automated approaches in several steps of the complex analysis pipeline, often consisting of cascades of statistical tests. In this frame, the identification of statistical significance has been one of the early challenges in the handling of omic data and remains a critical step due to the multiple hypotheses testing issue, given the large number of hypotheses examined at one time. Two main approaches are currently used: p-values based on random permutation approaches and the False Discovery Rate. Both give meaningful and important results, however they suffer respectivel
y from being computationally heavy -due to the large number of data that has to be generated-, or extremely flexible with respect to the definition of the significance threshold, leading to difficulties in standardization. We present here a complementary/alternative approach to these current ones and discuss performances and limitations.
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