title: The Bayesian t-test and beyond.
abstract: In this chapter we will explore Bayesian alternatives to the t-test. We saw in Chapter 1 how t-test can be used to test whether the expected outcomes of the two groups are equal or not. In Chapter 3 we saw how to make inferences from a Bayesian perspective in principle. In this chapter we will put these together to develop a Bayesian procedure for a t-test. This procedure depends on the data only through the t-statistic. It requires prior inputs and we will discuss how to assign them. We will use an example from a microarray study as to demonstrate the practical issues. The microarray study is an important application for the Bayesian t-test as it naturally brings up the question of simultaneous t-tests. It turns out that the Bayesian procedure can easily be extended to carry several t-tests on the same data set, provided some attention is paid to the concept of the correlation between tests.
authors.affiliation: Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, New York, NY, USA.
authors.forename: Mithat
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Gönen
mesh_terms: D001499:Bayes Theorem; D046152:Gastrointestinal Stromal Tumors / Q000235:genetics; D006801:Humans; D020411:Oligonucleotide Array Sequence Analysis