a simple method for assessing sample sizes in microarray experiments一个简单的方法来评估微阵列实验的样本大小.pdfVIP

BMC Bioinformatics BioMed Central Methodology article Open Access A simple method for assessing sample sizes in microarray experiments Robert Tibshirani* Address: Health Research Policy, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA Email: Robert Tibshirani* - tibs@ * Corresponding author Published: 02 March 2006 Received: 04 October 2005 Accepted: 02 March 2006 BMC Bioinformatics2006, 7:106 doi:10.1186/1471-2105-7-106 This article is available from: /1471-2105/7/106 © 2006Tibshirani; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Abstract Background: In this short article, we discuss a simple method for assessing sample size requirements in microarray experiments. Results: Our method starts with the output from a permutation-based analysis for a set of pilot data, e.g. from the SAM package. Then for a given hypothesized mean difference and various samples sizes, we estimate the false discovery rate and false negative rate of a list of genes; these are also interpretable as per gene power and type I error. We also discuss application of our method to other kinds of response variables, for example survival outcomes. Conclusion: Our method seems to be usefu