BioNumerics offers a generalized and well-documented implementation of ANOVA (Analysis of Variance) and MANOVA (Multivariate Analysis of Variance) with comprehensive statistical analysis and validation testing tools. These very useful statistical methods allow you to investigate the relation between groups of entries and characters, as well as the significance of such groups. In this tutorial the (M)ANOVA tool implemented in BioNumerics will be illustrated using a sample data set.
Characters
A character is basically a name-value pair of which the value can be binary, multi-state or continuous. Because of this very broad definition, a wide variety of data can be analyzed as character types (= an array of characters). This includes morphological and biochemical features, commercial test panels (API®, Biolog®, Vitek®, etc.), antibiotics resistance profiles, fatty acid profiles, microarrays, SNP arrays, repeat numbers in MLVA, allelic profiles in MLST, etc.
