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Some statistics in bioinformatics: The fifth Armitage Lecture
Author(s) -
Solomon Patricia J.
Publication year - 2009
Publication title -
statistics in medicine
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.996
H-Index - 183
eISSN - 1097-0258
pISSN - 0277-6715
DOI - 10.1002/sim.3668
Subject(s) - computer science , medical statistics , data science , statistical analysis , bioinformatics , biology , statistics , mathematics
The spirit and content of the 2007 Armitage Lecture are presented in this paper. To begin, two areas of Peter Armitage's early work are distinguished: his pioneering research on sequential methods intended for use in medical trials and the comparison of survival curves. Their influence on much later work is highlighted, and motivate the proposal of several statistical ‘truths’ that are presented in the paper. The illustration of these truths demonstrates biology's new morphology and its dominance over statistics in this century. An overview of a recent proteomics ovarian cancer study is given as a warning of what can happen when bioinformatics meets epidemiology badly, in particular, when the study design is poor. A statistical bioinformatics success story is outlined, in which gene profiling is helping to identify novel genes and networks involved in mouse embryonic stem cell development. Some concluding thoughts are given. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.