Critical Analysis of Microarray Data (CAMDA)

CAMDA was founded to provide a forum for the critical assessment of the many different techniques used in microarray data mining (Nature 411, 885; Nature 424, 610; Nature Methods 5, 659). It aims to establish the state of the art in microarray data analysis, as well as highlight progress and identify directions of future efforts. In order to achieve these goals, CAMDA adopted the approach of a community-wide experiment, letting the scientific community analyse the same contest data sets. Researchers worldwide were invited to take the CAMDA challenge. Accepted submissions were asked to give an oral presentation. Results of analysis were discussed and compared at the CAMDA conference.

As a special opportunity of CAMDA 2008, a selection of analysis predictions were also verified experimentally by the laboratory collecting the original contest data set. CAMDA provides a unique environment for testing and demonstrating your latest analysis methods. In addition, the Emerald project has recently provided fresh data from an experiment dissecting technical and biological variance in known mixture samples on three different platforms, now also available via ArrayExpress.

CAMDA was initiated by Simon Lin and Kimberly Johnson from the Duke University Bioinformatics Shared Resource in 2000. Only in 2007 has CAMDA become an internationally roving conference, with the first such meeting held at CIPF in Valencia, Spain.

Our group has proudly hosted CAMDA 2008 at Boku University Vienna, Austria and CAMDA 2011 as an official Satellite Meeting of ISMB/ECCB 2011. Recorded talks and presentations are now available (CAMDA 2008, CAMDA 2011).