I came across an interesting paper by Ann Boulesteix where she discusses the problem of false positive results being reported in the bioinformatics literature. She highlights two underlying phenomena that lead to this issue – “fishing for significance” and “publication bias”. The former phenomenon is characterized by researchers identifying datasets on which their method works better […]
New Version of rpubchem
Version 1.4.3 of rpubchem is out on CRAN. There’s some minor code cleanups and also a new function called get.aid.by.cid which allows you to get assay ID’s based on whether they contain a compound (either as an active, inactive, discrepant or just tested). This uses PUG to perform the query, so can be a bit […]
Frequency of a Term via PubMed
A little while back, Egon posted a question on FriendFeed, asking whether there was an easy way, preferably a service, to determine and plot the usage count of a term in PubMed by year. This is simple enough using the Entrez Utilities CGI. A quick Python script to do this (with minimal error checking) is […]
Updated Versions of R Packages
New versions of several of my R packages are now available on CRAN. rcdk 2.9.6 goes along with rcdklibs 1.2.3. The latter now uses the most recent cdk-1.2.x branch from Github. The former fixes a number of bugs relating to descriptor calculations, saving molecules in SD format and setting/getting properties on molecules. Unfortunately, because the […]
Another Conference Done
The CHI RNAi conference is over and will now head back home. Being new to the field of RNAi screening, I’ve been looking for a place (virtual or real) where I can meet other people, especially those working in large scale screening facilities. Reading the literature is certainly useful, but face to face interactions are […]