Abstract

Microarrays measure the abundance of DNA transcripts for thousands of gene sequences, simultaneously facilitating genomic comparisons across tissue types or disease status. These experiments are used to understand fundamental aspects of growth and development and to explore the underlying genetic causes of many diseases. The data from most microarray studies are found in open-access online databases. Bayesian models are ideal for the analysis of microarray data because of their ability to integrate prior information; however, most current Bayesian analyses use empirical or flat priors. We present a Perl script to build an informative prior by mining online databases for similar microarray experiments. Four prior distributions are investigated: a power prior including information from multiple previous experiments, an informative prior using information from one previous experiment, an empirically estimated prior, and a flat prior. The method is illustrated with a two-sample experiment to determine the preferential regulation of genes by tamoxifen in breast cancer cells.

Degree

College and Department

Physical and Mathematical Sciences; Statistics

Rights

http://lib.byu.edu/about/copyright/