Buggy bioinformatics software

Wed, 07 Nov 2007 14:43:52 +0000

As people who read my science-related posts know already, I’m not a big fan of software made just to support a publication. Recently I’ve stumbled again into similar software. Namely, I’m talking about the TIGR Multiexperiment Viewer (TMeV), a Java-based program which is often used for microarray analysis. It’s not exactly “fit for publication”, because it has reached version 4 last year, but shows some of the problems (mentioned already) with releasing bioinformatics software.

I use TMeV mostly because I didn’t find any other implementation of the hierarchical clustering algorithm with support trees. However, I’ve stumbled upon a very annoying bug in the most recent version. Normally I use average linkage clustering and as the distance metric I employ the Pearson’s correlation, and with gene and sample bootstrapping: with certain files this makes TMeV report errors at random during the iterations.

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Buggy bioinformatics software