Statistical methods for inferring gene expression similarities

Abstract: Predicting phenotypes from genotypes is one of the major challenges of functional genomics. In this talk, I will introduce a Bayesian method of using microarray repositories to create a disease diagnosis database. Various statistical issues and problems involved in this analysis will be discussed. This study will provide an important application for the enormous amount of costly generated, yet freely available, genomics data. In many disease diagnosis cases, it is not obvious which potential disease should be targeted, and screening across the enormous accumulation of disease expression profiles will help to narrow down the disease candidates.