How does MetaboAnalyst compute power?

In general, it is inappropriate to directly apply the traditional univariate approach on power analysis to omics datasets which are characterized by high dimensions with 100s to 1000s of features and a relative small number of samples.

The power analysis in MetaboAnalyst is based on the R package SSPA that was originally developed for power calculation for gene expression datasets. For a given pilot data, the method estimates the average power for a given false discovery rate. For more details, please refer to the original publication by M van Iterson et al