John D. Storey is the William R. Harman '63 and Mary-Love Harman Professor in Genomics at

Princeton University Princeton University is a private university, private Ivy League research university in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the List of Colonial ...

. His research is focused on statistical inference of high-dimensional data, particularly genomic data. Storey was the founding director of the

Center for

Statistics Statistics (from German language, German: ', "description of a State (polity), state, a country") is the discipline that concerns the collection, organization, analysis, interpretation, and presentation of data. In applying statistics to a s ...

and

Machine Learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of study in artificial intelligence concerned with the development and study of Computational statistics, statistical algorithms that can learn from data and generalise to unseen data, and thus perform Task ( ...

Research

Storey's early research focused on the

false discovery rate In statistics, the false discovery rate (FDR) is a method of conceptualizing the rate of type I errors in null hypothesis testing when conducting multiple comparisons. FDR-controlling procedures are designed to control the FDR, which is the exp ...

. At the time the false discovery rate had only been studied in the context of sequential p-value methods and it was not yet in widespread use. However, Storey showed that false discovery rates can be approached through point estimation opening up this very active branch of statistics to false discovery rates. He simultaneously proved a result showing that the positive false discovery rate (pFDR) is exactly equal to a Bayesian

posterior probability The posterior probability is a type of conditional probability that results from updating the prior probability with information summarized by the likelihood via an application of Bayes' rule. From an epistemological perspective, the posteri ...

, thereby providing the first direct connection between false discovery rates and Bayesian theory. In these works, he also invented the q-value, which is a false discovery rate analogue of the

p-value In null-hypothesis significance testing, the ''p''-value is the probability of obtaining test results at least as extreme as the result actually observed, under the assumption that the null hypothesis is correct. A very small ''p''-value means ...

. Storey then introduced false discovery rates and q-values as widely applicable measures of statistical significance in genomics, shifting the focus from false positive control to false discovery rate control. With Jeff Leek, Storey discovered that "expression heterogeneity", or unmodeled sources of systematic variation in

gene expression Gene expression is the process (including its Regulation of gene expression, regulation) by which information from a gene is used in the synthesis of a functional gene product that enables it to produce end products, proteins or non-coding RNA, ...

data, are very prevalent and need to be modeled and corrected when analyzing genome-wide gene expression data. Leek and Storey introduced "surrogate variable analysis", which is a high-dimensional regression model that includes both known and unknown covariates. He has developed a number of methods for estimating this model. Recently, Storey has shifted his focus to population genomics, where he has introduced genome-wide models of

allele frequencies Allele frequency, or gene frequency, is the relative frequency of an allele (variant of a gene) at a particular locus in a population, expressed as a fraction or percentage. Specifically, it is the fraction of all chromosomes in the population tha ...

, Hardy–Weinberg equilibrium, and

F-statistics In population genetics, ''F''-statistics (also known as fixation indices) describe the statistically expected level of heterozygosity in a population; more specifically the expected degree of (usually) a reduction in heterozygosity when compared ...

that hold under arbitrary population structures.

Honors and awards

* Fellow of the

American Association for the Advancement of Science The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is a United States–based international nonprofit with the stated mission of promoting cooperation among scientists, defending scientific freedom, encouraging scientific responsib ...

2011 * Fellow of the

Institute of Mathematical Statistics The Institute of Mathematical Statistics is an international professional and scholarly society devoted to the development, dissemination, and application of statistics and probability. The Institute currently has about 4,000 members in all parts ...

2012 *

COPSS Presidents' Award The COPSS Presidents' Award is given annually by the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies to a young statistician in recognition of outstanding contributions to the profession of statistics Statistics (from German language, Ger ...

2015 * Mortimer Spiegelman Award 2015

References

External links

Homepage
{{DEFAULTSORT:Storey, John D. Living people American statisticians Princeton University faculty Fellows of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science Year of birth missing (living people) Statistical geneticists