Making Informed Choices about Microarray Data Analysis

This article describes the typical stages in the analysis of microarray data for nonspecialist researchers in systems biology and medicine.Particular attention is paid to significant data analysis issues that are commonly encountered among practitioners, some of which need wider airing.The issues addressed include experimental design, quality assessment, normalization, and summarization of multiple-probe data.This article is based on the ISMB 2008 tutorial on microarray data analysis.An expanded version of the material in this article and the slides from the tutorial can be found at http://www.people.vcu.edu/,mreimers/OGMDA/index.html.