This Week, I Am A Scientist

This week, I am a scientist;  I know this, because I have an article in Science. 

It's nice to have something to point to that my parents can understand.  I don't mean they'll understand the paper, but they'll understand that getting a paper in Science is important, more so than my papers that appear other places.  And because they're probably reading this, I will also point them to the Globe article appearing today about the work, even though the article rightly focuses on the cool and unusual fact that the lead authors are two brothers, David and Yakir Reshef.

I had been planning to write one or more posts about the paper -- both the technical stuff and the great fun I've been having working with David, Yakir, my long-time colleague Hilary Finucane, the truly amazing systems biology professor Pardis Sabeti, and others on this project.  (See Pardis's Wikipedia page or this site to see how Pardis rocks!)  But between Science's "news embargo" policies and my own end-of-semester busy-ness, I blew it.  I'll try to have them out next week.  But for now, for those of you who might be interested, here's the link to the project web page, and here's the abstract:

Detecting Novel Associations in Large Data Sets

Abstract: Identifying interesting relationships between pairs of variables in large data sets is increasingly important. Here, we present a measure of dependence for two-variable relationships: the maximal information coefficient (MIC). MIC captures a wide range of associations both functional and not, and for functional relationships provides a score that roughly equals the coefficient of determination (R2) of the data relative to the regression function. MIC belongs to a larger class of maximal information-based nonparametric exploration (MINE) statistics for identifying and classifying relationships. We apply MIC and MINE to data sets in global health, gene expression, major-league baseball, and the human gut microbiota and identify known and novel relationships.