Methodology article
A simple method for assessing sample sizes in microarray experiments
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Correspondence: Robert Tibshirani tibs@stanford.edu
Health Research & Policy, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA
BMC Bioinformatics 2006, 7:106 doi:10.1186/1471-2105-7-106
Published: 2 March 2006Abstract
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 useful for sample size assessment in microarray experiments.