How to prepare data sets for statistical meta-analysis?

MetaboAnalyst
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Here are some basic rules for data collection for using Statistical Meta-analysis module in MetaboAnalyst:

  1. These data sets were collected under comparable experimental conditions, and/or the underlying experiments share the same hypothesis or are held to have the same mechanistic underpinnings;
  2. Only two-group comparisons are supported at the moment (i.e., control vs disease);
  3. These datasets must share the same type of IDs so that the majority of these feature will match. This is usually not possible for untargeted metabolomics. Please use Functional Meta-analysis module in this case;
  4. It is best to keep all data on the same scale or range (i.e. both raw or normalized in the same way). It is generally preferred to compare at log scale. MetaboAnalyst offers boxplots and log normalization to help facilitate this process.