BMC Immunology BioMed Central Commentary Open Access A guide to modern statistical analysis of immunological data Bernd Genser*1,2, Philip J Cooper3,4, Maria Yazdanbakhsh5, Mauricio L Barreto2 and Laura C Rodrigues2 Address: 1Department of Epidemiology and Population Health, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, London, UK, 2Instituto de Saúde Coletiva, Federal University of Bahia, Salvador, Brazil, 3Centre for Infection, St George's University of London, London, UK, 4Instituto de Microbiologia, Universidad San Francisco de Quito, Quito, Ecuador and 5Department of Parasitology, Leiden University Medical Center, Leiden, The Netherlands Email: Bernd Genser* -
[email protected]; Philip J Cooper -
[email protected]; Maria Yazdanbakhsh -
[email protected]; Mauricio L Barreto -
[email protected]; Laura C Rodrigues -
[email protected] * Corresponding author Published: 26 October 2007 Received: 22 February 2007 Accepted: 26 October 2007 BMC Immunology 2007, 8:27 doi:10.1186/1471-2172-8-27 This article is available from: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2172/8/27 © 2007 Genser et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Abstract Background: The number of subjects that can be recruited in immunological studies and the number of immunological parameters that can be measured has increased rapidly over the past decade and is likely to continue to expand. Large and complex immunological datasets can now be used to investigate complex scientific questions, but to make the most of the potential in such data and to get the right answers sophisticated statistical approaches are necessary.