To combat that problem, Lin helped found an annual competition called Critical Assessment of Microarray Data Analysis (CAMDA; www.camda.duke.edu). The idea is to present statisticians with published data sets and turn them loose to analyze the data in any way they choose, asking any biological question they choose.
The CAMDA organizing team chose the papers because the data sets are large enough to be a computational challenge, and because "we were looking for some important biology behind it. This is not a pure computational game here—we are looking forward to getting some useful biological insight by re-analyzing the data," says Lin.
Judging the competition is tricky, Lin admits, because the techniques used vary widely and there's no "right answer" to shoot for. The judging has two components—an audience vote and a panel of judges. The criteria, he says, are innovation and the biological relevance of the method to the question ...
