Guidelines for statistical analysis and reporting of microarray studies for epidemiology
| Checklist | Comment | |
|---|---|---|
| Do | Clearly state the causal contrasts being studied and how exposures were defined. | Consider and discuss potential exposure misclassification and its impact on findings. |
| Do | Identify potential confounders using appropriate causal diagrams and adjust for them using statistical methods. | Age may be an important confounder of exposure-gene expression associations. |
| Do | Discuss how the genomic methods used may have created selection biases. | |
| Do | Use class prediction on independent test sets and report sensitivity and specificity of predictors. | |
| Don't | Misuse standard terminology such as “test set” or unsupervised. | |
| Do | Report measures of internal reproducibility. | Report intraclass correlation coefficients for duplicates. |
| Do | Supplement technical validation (e.g., quantitative PCR) with external validation where possible. | Use publicly deposited data to confirm pathways affected by exposure. |
| Do | Deposit data in public databases at the time of review and before publication. |
NOTE: This table is formatted as a supplement to a table presented by Dupuy and Simons (13).