Statistic 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.