Journal of Data Science

Abstract: Methods for testing the equality of two means are of critical importance in many areas of applied statistics. In the microarray context, it is often necessary to apply this kind of testing to small samples containing no more than a dozen elements, when inevitably the power of these tests is low. We suggest an augmentation of the classical t-test by introducing a new test statistic which we call “bio-weight.” We show by simulation that in practically important cases of small sample size, the test based on this statistic is substantially more powerful than that of the classical t-test. The power computations are accompanied by ROC and FDR analysis of the simulated microarray data.