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Wednesday, December 19, 2012

Simple Enrichment Test -- calculate hypergeometric p-values in R

Hypergeometric test are useful for enrichment analysis. For example, having a gene list in hand, people might want to tell which functions (GO terms) are enriched among these genes. Hypergeometric test (or its equivalent: one-tailed Fisher's exact test) will give you statistical confidence in \(p\)-values.

R software provids function phyper and fisher.test for Hypergeometric and Fisher's exact test accordingly. However, it is tricky to get it right. I spent some time to make it clear.