Meeting Summary for 9/3/08

We worked through chapter 3 of the Montgomery book and talked about various statistical distributions, i.e. normal, lognormal, gamma, poisson, etc. We also tried to relate them to our area of study, which is elaborated by Archana's post earlier.

For next time we decided to discuss data pre-processing for DNA microarrays. I have a few books on my desk, one by Knudsen, one by Draghici, and one by Speed that could lend some insight. Archana already addressed the other goal of assumption of normal distribution of such data. Next time Archana should also brief us on use of the binomial distribution as it pertains to enrichment of gene ontology terms. We all decided to independently investigate when and where the gamma distribution is used in biology besides the one place we knew already, namely as a step in getting the beta distribution for discrete Bayesian network analysis.