Applying genomic meta-analyses to understand disease
/Wanted: More Data, the Dirtier the Better
by Esther Landhuis, Quanta Magazine
“To distill a clear message from growing piles of unruly genomics data, researchers often turn to meta-analysis — a tried-and-true statistical procedure for combining data from multiple studies. But the studies that a meta-analysis might mine for answers can diverge endlessly. Some enroll only men, others only children. Some are done in one country, others across a region like Europe. Some focus on milder forms of a disease, others on more advanced cases. Even if statistical methods can compensate for these kinds of variations, studies rarely use the same protocols and instruments to collect the data, or the same software to analyze it. Researchers performing meta-analyses go to untold lengths trying to clean up the hodgepodge of data to control for these confounding factors.”
