Some thoughts on counts in sequencing studies

Abstract

Measurements in sequencing studies are mostly based on counts. There is a lack of theoretical developments for the analysis and modelling of this type of data. Some thoughts in this direction are presented, which might serve as a seed. The main issues addressed are the compositional character of multinomial probabilities and the corresponding representation in orthogonal (isometric) coordinates, and modelling distributions for sequencing data taking into account possible effects of amplification techniques.