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[Bioc-devel] Changes to the SummarizedExperiment Class

It sounds like the proposed changes are already made.  However (like
others) I am still a bit mystified why this was necessary.  The old version
did allow for a GRanges inside the DataFrame of the rowData, as far as I
recall.  So I assume this is for efficiency.  But why?  What kind of
data/use cases is this for?

I am happy to hear that SummarizedExperiment is going to be spun out into
its own package.  When that happens, I have some comments, which I'll
include here in anticipation
  1) I now very strongly believe it was a design mistake to not have
colnames on the assays.  The advantage of this choice is that sampleNames
are only stored one place.  The extreme disadvantage is the high
ineffeciency when you want colnames on an extracted assay.
  2) I still strongly believe we should support pData, sampleNames etc etc
on SummarizedExperiments.
  3) Having developed a package (minfi) where eSets co-exists with
SummarizedExperiment, I have to mention that for the developer there is a
number of places where the different internals of these two classes makes
like irritating.  For this reason I would support a "modern" implementation
of eSet, in parallel with SummarizedExperiment.

Best,
Kasper

On Fri, Mar 6, 2015 at 10:59 AM, Valerie Obenchain <vobencha at fredhutch.org>
wrote: