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[Bioc-devel] medianpolish for Affymetrix genechip probesets

Wolfgang,

The method you suggest would work, but I am a little hesitant to
recommend you .Call the c code directly. I'd prefer that you just call
rma() with the background and normalize arguments set to FALSE, though
that will add a little additional overhead, it won't do anything more
that the median polish summarization step. That is essentially the
approach taken in GCRMA (except that it sets background=FALSE,
normalize=TRUE in its rma() call).

However, you do raise a larger issue about the multiple implementations
in various different packages. Mostly the functionality that is
duplicated consists of the exact same C code in affy, affyPLM and oligo
(except sometimes a little outdated), with larger differences in
BufferedMatrixMethods. I did make a promise in the past that I would fix
this potential maintenance problem by building a package that unify this
C code in a single location. This way potential developers who wanted to
use say, quantile normalization or median polish, but did not want to
"Depends:" on affy (or similar). But building infrastructure is
decidedly un-sexy, so it is still on my to do list (though perhaps a
little higher now).

Best,

Ben
On Fri, 2007-03-09 at 14:31 +0000, Wolfgang Huber wrote: