Life Sciences Commons^™

Is A Basketball Free-Throw Sequence Nonrandom? A Group Exercise For Undergraduate Statistics Students, Stephen C. Adolph

All HMC Faculty Publications and Research

I describe a group exercise that I give to my undergraduate biostatistics class. The exercise involves analyzing a series of 200 consecutive basketball free-throw attempts to determine whether there is any evidence for sequential dependence in the probability of making a free-throw. The students are given the exercise before they have learned the appropriate statistical tests, so that they can come up with ideas on their own. Students spend a full class period working on the problem, with my guidance and hints. In the next class period, we discuss how each student group approached the problem. I then present several …

A Robust Measure Of Correlation Between Two Genes On A Microarray, Johanna S. Hardin, Aya Mitani '06, Leanne Hicks, Brian Vankoten

Pomona Faculty Publications and Research

Background

The underlying goal of microarray experiments is to identify gene expression patterns across different experimental conditions. Genes that are contained in a particular pathway or that respond similarly to experimental conditions could be co-expressed and show similar patterns of expression on a microarray. Using any of a variety of clustering methods or gene network analyses we can partition genes of interest into groups, clusters, or modules based on measures of similarity. Typically, Pearson correlation is used to measure distance (or similarity) before implementing a clustering algorithm. Pearson correlation is quite susceptible to outliers, however, an unfortunate characteristic when dealing …