Budgeted transcript discovery: A framework for joint exploration and validation studies

This paper presents the budgeted transcript discovery problem (BTD): deciding how to spend a given research budget collecting data, using a combination of microarrays and PCRs, to discover which transcripts are differentially expressed with respect to a given phenotype. We present algorithms that address this task by sequentially analyzing the data collected so far, to decide which data would be most informative to collect next. We provide empirical studies that demonstrate their effectiveness.