Abstract

We derive a quantile-adjusted conditional maximum likelihood estimator for the dispersion parameter of the negative binomial distribution and compare its performance, in terms of bias, to various other methods. Our estimation scheme outperforms all other methods in very small samples, typical of those from serial analysis of gene expression studies, the motivating data for this study. The impact of dispersion estimation on hypothesis testing is studied. We derive an "exact" test that outperforms the standard approximate asymptotic tests.

Keywords

Negative binomial distributionEstimatorStatisticsBinomial distributionQuantileMathematicsDispersion (optics)Beta-binomial distributionApplied mathematicsEconometricsPoisson distributionPhysics

MeSH Terms

BiasBinomial DistributionBiometryExpressed Sequence TagsGene Expression ProfilingGene LibraryHumansInformation Storage and RetrievalLikelihood FunctionsRNAMessengerRegression AnalysisResearch DesignSample SizeStochastic ProcessesWeights and Measures

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Publication Info

Year
2007
Type
article
Volume
9
Issue
2
Pages
321-332
Citations
1111
Access
Closed

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Cite This

Mark D. Robinson, Gordon K. Smyth (2007). Small-sample estimation of negative binomial dispersion, with applications to SAGE data. Biostatistics , 9 (2) , 321-332. https://doi.org/10.1093/biostatistics/kxm030

Identifiers

DOI
10.1093/biostatistics/kxm030
PMID
17728317

Data Quality

Data completeness: 86%