Response to comments on Bayesian Hierarchical Error Model for Analysis of Gene Expression Data'

摘要

We greatly thank the authors of this letter for pointing out the significance of our original contribution of the hierarchical error model (HEM) in Cho and Lee (2004). As the authors suggested, we agree that an extension of HEM can be made for gene expression data with biological and/or experimental correlations. However, we here discuss several issues in response to some of the points raised in this letter. First, in this letter the simplified posterior distributions were derived under the assumption of the same numbers of biological and experimental replicates for all conditions, i.e. m_(ij) = m and n_(ijk) = n. However, in practical microarray studies, the numbers of replicates can often differ among different conditions (e.g. m_(i1) = 5 and m_(i2) = 6).