brt: An R package for integrating biological relevance with p value in omics data

Abstract

Summaryp-value as an indicator of statistical significance is commonly used in biological data. However, considering p-value alone neglects the importance of effect size (i.e., the mean difference between groups) in determining the biological relevance of a "significant" difference. Here, we present a novel algorithm for computing a new statistic, the biological relevance testing (BRT) index, in the frequentist hypothesis testing framework to address this problem. We also show that the results from the BRT procedure provided a promising way to select biologically relevant features by applying it to microarray-type data. Availability and ImplementationFreely available on the web at https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=brt. Contactpengyu.bio@gmail.com