Mathematics Colloquia and Seminars

Return to Colloquia & Seminar listing

Biologists now have the capacity to measure thousands of compounds simultaneously from a single biological sample using gene expression arrays, mass spectrometry, NMR spectroscopy or other methods. These methods can be used to measure mRNA transcripts, proteins, short peptides, lipids, and other biologically active compounds. In this talk, I will describe an important statistical challenge in the use of such data. Using raw data, logarithms, or ratios, the variability of the measurements is strongly dependent on the level of expression, causing a failure of the assumptions of most standard methods of statistical analysis. We present a solution to this problem via a specially tuned data transformation and show how it promotes the effectiveness of simple and sophisticated analyses of the data.

Refreshments Provided.