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re: the arxiv link

Why is it that microarray true positive p-values follow a beta distribution? Following the citations led to a lot of empirical confirmation but I couldn't find any discussion of why.

More to the point of this rebuttal, though: why would we expect the amalgamation of 70k micro-array experiments' abstract-reported p-values to follow a single beta distribution? And what about modeling the bias-induced bump of barely-significant results?

If there's some theoretical reason why the meta-study can use the beta-uniform model, then I could see this being only a mild underestimation of the proportion of false positives (14%), but otherwise I'm confused how we can interpret this.




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