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Abstract:
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The theory and practice of design of experiments has its roots in agriculture, with the major developments at Rothamsted by people such as Fisher and Yates. They developed the theory of blocking, components of variance, and incomplete block designs. Most all of this theory is still relevant and translates almost seamlessly to modern applications such as microarray experiments. We review these designs and their applications for today, pointing out how the 70-year-old theory guides us to good microarray designs. The available computer packages and their default analyses can often result in incorrect test statistics and confidence intervals. We show how to recognize and avoid this, and we look at a number of examples of good and bad experiments. We also look at designs that have arisen as a result of microarrays (reference and loops) and see what the 70-year-old theory has to say.
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