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Selecting Differentially Expressed Genes From Microarray Experiments, Margaret S. Pepe, Gary M. Longton, Garnet L. Anderson, Michel Schummer

UW Biostatistics Working Paper Series

High throughput technologies, such as gene expression arrays and protein mass spectrometry, allow one to simultaneously evaluate thousands of potential biomarkers that distinguish different tissue types. Of particular interest here is cancer versus normal organ tissues. We consider statistical methods to rank genes (or proteins) in regards to differential expression between tissues. Various statistical measures are considered and we argue that two measures related to the Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve are particularly suitable for this purpose. We also propose that sampling variability in the gene rankings be quantified and suggest using the “selection probability function”, the probability distribution of rankings …