Statistical Consulting

Office hours : Tuesday 3:00pm-5:00pm and Thursday 11:00am -1:00pm

Statistical consulting for experiments in the Cancer Stem Cell Program is available by contacting Biostatistician Changjiang Xu at changjiang.xu@utoronto.ca. In order to ensure that appropriate advice be given, the consulting is strongly suggested at the design stage of the experiment.

Upfront required Information from researcher:

• A complete and concise summary of information about the experiment,
• Experimental units, i.e., animal strain/Humans, etc. How were they selected?
• Sample preparation procedure if any
• Was the experiment conducted on different days/times, etc?
• Clear and concise research questions to be investigated
• Specify the number of experimental conditions (factors) that you plan to study, that might influence the response variable (gene expression values in case of microarray experiments)
• Number of stages that the experiment will be conducted. This will help us make sure that any factor (condition) of interest is not confounded with some non-biological factor, etc.
• The type of analysis that the researcher would think would be suitable to perform
• The type of chip that would be used, if microarray experiment
• Number of the samples that researcher is planning based on budget

After this upfront meeting, the statistician would take a week to make a framework for the issues and suggest the statistical feasibility for the project. The statistician would give recommendations for the number of samples, any other design issues, randomization, blocking etc.