title: A tail strength measure for assessing the overall univariate significance in a dataset.
abstract: We propose an overall measure of significance for a set of hypothesis tests. The 'tail strength' is a simple function of the p-values computed for each of the tests. This measure is useful, for example, in assessing the overall univariate strength of a large set of features in microarray and other genomic and biomedical studies. It also has a simple relationship to the false discovery rate of the collection of tests. We derive the asymptotic distribution of the tail strength measure, and illustrate its use on a number of real datasets.
authors.affiliation: Department of Statistics, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305,USA. jtaylor@stat.stanford.edu
authors.forename: Jonathan
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Taylor
authors.forename: Robert
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Tibshirani
mesh_terms: D001699:Biometry / Q000379:methods*; D016208:Databases, Factual; D030541:Databases, Genetic; D020869:Gene Expression Profiling / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D006801:Humans; D009369:Neoplasms / Q000235:genetics; D020411:Oligonucleotide Array Sequence Analysis / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D016016:Proportional Hazards Models; D012372:ROC Curve