mikejiang/QUALIFIER — Issue #2: a more generic way to specify population on which QA is to be done
Author: mikejiang
Created: 2012-02-10 02:14:01+00:00
State: open

There are two columns in the extracted stats table:
1.node (a unique gate name copied from gating hierarchy,such as "31.MNC"
2.population (a parsed gate name by stripping the number or possibly the channel name from the node.
such as "33.APC-A MFI" -->"MFI" or "34.FITC-A margin"->"margin".

Then the user needs to specify the "population" info in order for the package to know what to be compared across samples.
In ITN's gating template, we even strip the channel name to provide the convenient way for user to specify multiple populations with one common name (like pop= "MFI", then MFI+ on multiple channels will extracted from the db) to get .

However this is not a robust design, because this user case is kinda peculiar, pop name parser has to look for "MFI" or "margin" keywords specifically in order to strip the channel name off it.

@gfinak propose the regular expression to accomplish extraction of multiple similar populations with one input. And providing another two input options: full gating path and terminal gate name(the name without number prefix). We need to talk to @raphg to confirm the final solution.