Modern high-throughput biological assays let us ask detailed questions
about how diseases operate, and promise to let us personalize therapy.
Careful data processing is essential, because our intuition about what the
answers "should" look like is very poor when we have to juggle thousands of
things at once. When documentation of such processing is absent, we must
apply "forensic bioinformatics" to work from the raw data and reported
results to infer what the methods must have been. We will present several
case studies where simple errors may have put patients at risk. This work
has been covered in both the scientific and lay press, including the front
page of the New York Times and 60 Minutes, and has prompted several
journals to revisit the types of information that must accompany
publications. We discuss steps we take to avoid such errors, and lessons
that can be applied to large data sets more broadly.
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Last modified: April 11 2016 - 18:14:43