Stats question re WinList

From: Daniel Chipchase (D.Chipchase@oxfordbiomedica.co.uk)
Date: Thu Sep 06 2001 - 08:00:42 EST


Dear Flowers,

Please excuse my ignorance: I am presently having a little trouble
understanding the statistics presented in flow software and have managed to
get myself in a bit of muddle really so I would be grateful (not eternally
so but certainly pretty grateful nonetheless) if someone could help me
out....

Anyway straight to the point...
WinList results windows display mean, medians and modal values. These are
channel values (as I was keen enough to notice after having previouly used
CellQuest) so to transform to log (expression) values and assuming I am
using a 4 decade log scale at 1024 res I am performing the following
calculation

y=10^(x/256) where x is the average value you wish to transform

Also I am assuming the mean quoted is the arithmetic mean which is
equivalent to the geometric mean of transformed data. Is this assumption
correct?

Right well this seems fine but I am not sure where this leaves me with
standard deviations. Are the standard deviations calculated directly from
linear channel values or are they calculated from log data and the answer
somehow converted into a linear channel value. I suppose my real question is
how is the data stored in the list mode data file - I thought as linear
channel values.

If the standard deviation quoted by Winlist is calculated from the linear
data (untransformed data) is this at all relevant in calculating error bars
for expression (log) studies? I was hoping to use the STD as error bars
around expression data but am not sure if this is 'correct'. I was
establishing upper and lower limits on 1 standard deviation (by adding and
subtracting STD from the mean expression), resulting in a linear value and
transforming to find the log equivalents.

Hoping someone can make some sense of my ramblings,

Daniel Chipchase,
Research Assistant,
Lentivectors,
Oxford Biomedica (UK) Ltd,
Oxford Science Park.



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