Analysis of Megavariate Data in Functional Genomics

Over the latest decades, there has been a rapid development of laboratory techniques used for analyzing the pathways from the genes to the final physiology of an organism. Insight into the biological mechanism controlling growth and development of an organism is thereby enabled at a level that was never before possible. This in turn can be utilized, for example, in health care for improved diagnostics and improved medical treatment of diseases, and in agricultural science for tailoring plants and animals with desirable properties. Both from a biological and from a data analytical point of view the scientists are facing major challenges in the research area of analyzing functional genomics data. This chapter aims at addressing some of these challenges, and discusses important questions that need to be considered as well as gives guidelines to some useful approaches for analyzing data from functional genomics. The focus of this chapter is on data modeling of empirical data from functional genomics.