title: Loading and preparing data for analysis in spotfire.
abstract: This unit strictly focuses on data preparation within Spotfire. Microarray data exist in a variety of formats, which often depend on the particular array technology and detection instruments used. The first protocols in this unit describe loading Affymetrix and GenePix data into Spotfire. Once the data are loaded, it is necessary to filter and preprocess the data prior to analysis. Subsequently, the data transformation and normalization techniques presented here, are critical to correctly performing powerful microarray data mining expeditions. These steps extract or enhance meaningful data characteristics and prepare the data for the application of certain analysis methods such as statistical tests to compute significance and clustering methods-which mostly require data to be normally distributed. The unit outlines several methods for normalizing the data within an experiment and between multiple experiments.
authors.affiliation: Hartwell Center for Bioinformatics and Biotechnology, St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, Memphis, Tennessee, USA.
authors.forename: Deepak
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Kaushal
authors.forename: Clayton W
authors.initials: CW
authors.lastname: Naeve
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D003196:Computer Graphics; D003628:Database Management Systems; D030562:Databases, Protein; D020869:Gene Expression Profiling / Q000379:methods*; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval / Q000379:methods*; D020411:Oligonucleotide Array Sequence Analysis / Q000379:methods*; D012984:Software; D014584:User-Computer Interface