Glossary
Concatonation of 1 or more property vectors from the same subject at the same event with different sample preparations. This aggregates all properties known about a subject at a particular event
For a given preparation, a large number of datapoints might be generated. Each datapoint is characterized by a single real number and corresponds to some biophysical property of a prepared sample. For example a mass spectrometer may produce a set of datapoints each corresponding to a particular region in the [M/Z, RT] space. RNA-seq data may have a datapoint for the abundance of each unique sequence of K neucleotides (KMers)
A one-dimensional array of datapoint values corresponding to a single sample preparation
A CSV file that maps M/Z - RT to compound identification information
A particular point in a study where samples are being drawn from subjects. Example events might be "before treatment" or "10 hours after treatment"
The composite property vector for a given subject at a given event.
A numeric or categorical value associated with an example that specifies what is to be learned about that example. The example outcomes specify what is to be learned from the examples.
A well defined, possibly multi-step, process for converting a sample into data. Such a preparation might be converting blood to serum, dilution with acetonitrile, centrefuge, passing through a proteomic chromatography column and then mass spectrometry. Other preparations might convert a tissue sample into RNA-seq data. A given sample may be divided and passed through multiple preparations.
A tissue sample drawn from a subject at the time of a particular study event. Example samples might be blood, urine, saliva, needle biopsy or some other gathering of specific tissue from a specific subject at a specific event.
An individual organism (human or other) whose biology is being evaluated.