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[Bioc-devel] SummarizedExperiment subset of 4 dimensions

Dear Jesper

this is maybe not the answer you want to hear, but stuffing in 4, 5, ? dimensions may not be all that useful, as you can always roll out these higher dimensions into the existing third (or even into the second, the SummarizedExperiment columns). There is Hadley?s concept of ?tidy data? (see e.g. http://www.jstatsoft.org/v59/i10 ) ? a paper that is really worthwhile to read ? which implies that the tidy way forward is to stay with 2 (or maybe 3) dimensions in SummarizedExperiment, and to record the information that you?d otherwise stuff into the higher dimensions in the colData covariates.

Wolfgang

Wolfgang Huber
Principal Investigator, EMBL Senior Scientist
Genome Biology Unit
European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL)
Heidelberg, Germany

T +49-6221-3878823
wolfgang.huber at embl.de
http://www.huber.embl.de