Estimating the Occurrence of False Positives and False Negatives in Microarray Studies by Approximating and Partitioning the Empirical Distribution of P-values

MOTIVATION The occurrence of false positives and false negatives in a microarray analysis could be easily estimated if the distribution of p-values were approximated and then expressed as a mixture of null and alternative densities. Essentially any distribution of p-values can be expressed as such a mixture by extracting a uniform density from it. RESULTS The occurrence of false positives and false negatives in a microarray analysis could be easily estimated if the distribution of p-values were approximated and then expressed as a mixture of null and alternative densities. Essentially any distribution of p-values can be expressed as such a mixture by extracting a uniform density from it. AVAILABILITY An S-plus function library is available from http://www.stjuderesearch.org/statistics.