Biostatistics

Biostatistics faculty develop software platforms and programs to assist in the advancement of methodological research issues and facilitate solutions of data analysis problems they encounter.  

Although such software is often designed to address a methodological research problem in a specific biomedical or public health application area, such as genetics, it may become a useful tool in fields beyond its initial application. New software also can develop in the context of mentored research projects with students giving rise to joint publications. 

A January 2011 article in BMC Bioinformatics, A Platform for Processing Expression of Short Time Series (PESTS), introduces such a software platform developed by Anshu Sinha, PhD, while a doctoral student in the Department of Biomedical Informatics, and Marianthi Markatou, PhD, who sponsored her dissertation research while a member of the faculty in the Department of Biostatistics. 

The software was designed to incorporate unique methods they developed for significance analysis, multiple test correction and clustering of short time series data using biologically relevant features for analysis which summarize gene expression profiles and their dependence across time.   PESTS, developed to examine microarray profiles of genes over time that are dynamically expressed under given conditions and to determine the interaction between these genes, implements other standard techniques for comparability as well as visualization.  The software and methods are also generalizable to other types of time series analyses. 

Making such new software freely available to the widest possible audience may advance the research enterprise even in fields beyond its initial application.   

Click here to access PESTS software.