Chapter 2. Statistical Methods with R

This chapter will present an overview of how to summarize your data and get useful statistical information for downstream analysis. We will also show you how to plot and get statistical information from probability distributions and how to test the fit of your sample distribution to well-defined probability distributions. We will also go over some of the functions used to perform hypothesis testing including the Student's t-test, Wilcoxon rank-sum test, z-test, chi-squared test, Fisher's exact test, and F-test.

Before we begin, we will load the gene expression profiling data from the E-GEOD-19577 study entitled "MLL partner genes confer distinct biological and clinical signatures of pediatric AML, an AIEOP study" from the ArrayExpress website to use as a sample dataset for some of our examples. For simplicity, we will not go into the details of how the data was generated, except to mention that the study evaluates the expression...