Experiment level

The rest of the Side Panel is devoted to different levels of information on the values in the experiment. The experiment part contains a number of columns that, for each feature ID, provide summaries of the values across all the samples in the experiment (see figure 28.40).

Image experiment_table_experiment_level
Figure 28.40: The initial view of the experiment level for a two-group experiment.

Initially, it has one header for the whole Experiment:

Thus, the sign of the values in the 'Difference' and 'Fold change' columns give the direction of the trend across the groups, going from group 1 to group 2, etc.

If the samples used are Affymetrix GeneChips samples and have 'Present calls' there will also be a 'Total present count' column containing the number of present calls for all samples.

The columns under the 'Experiment' header are useful for filtering purposes, e.g. you may wish to ignore features that differ too little in expression levels to be confirmed e.g. by qPCR by filtering on the values in the 'Difference', 'IQR' or 'Fold Change' columns or you may wish to ignore features that do not differ at all by filtering on the 'Range' column.

If you have performed normalization or transformation, the IQR of the normalized and transformed values will also appear. Also, if you later choose to transform or normalize your experiment, columns will be added for the transformed or normalized values.

Note! It is very common to filter features on fold change values in expression analysis and fold change values are also used in volcano plots. There are different definitions of 'Fold Change' in the literature. The definition that is used typically depends on the original scale of the data that is analyzed. For data whose original scale is not the log scale the standard definition is the ratio of the group means [Tusher et al., 2001]. This is the value you find in the 'Fold Change' column of the experiment. However, for data whose original is the log scale, the difference of the mean expression levels is sometimes referred to as the fold change [Guo et al., 2006], and if you want to filter on fold change for these data you should filter on the values in the 'Difference' column. Your data's original scale will e.g. be the log scale if you have imported Affymetrix expression values which have been created by running the RMA algorithm on the probe-intensities.