Some statistics in bioinformatics: The fifth Armitage Lecture

Abstract

The spirit and content of the 2007 Armitage Lecture are presented in this paper. To begin, two areas of Peter Armitage's early work are distinguished: his pioneering research on sequential methods intended for use in medical trials and the comparison of survival curves. Their influence on much later work is highlighted, and motivate the proposal of several statistical 'truths' that are presented in the paper. The illustration of these truths demonstrates biology's new morphology and its dominance over statistics in this century. An overview of a recent proteomics ovarian cancer study is given as a warning of what can happen when bioinformatics meets epidemiology badly, in particular, when the study design is poor. A statistical bioinformatics success story is outlined, in which gene profiling is helping to identify novel genes and networks involved in mouse embryonic stem cell development. Some concluding thoughts are given.