Hi all, This is a statistics question, I hope someone out there will be able to help me. I have one population (oligonucleotide probes spotted on a Nimblegen array). I measured "parameter one" (intensity after hybridisation) and I have selected a subpopulation of the initial (one tenth of the initial) according to a threshold value. I now measure "parameter two" of the original population (GC content). The distribution of the population for this value is roughly bell-shaped. I want to see if the subpopulation I selected in the previous step shares the same characteristics with regards to the GC content with the entire population or if selecting for "parameter one" has messed with "parameter two". What I thought was to compare the distributions of this second attribute of the two populations. I believe that the ansari-bradley, wilcoxon and Kolmogorov-Smirnov tests perform such tests but -after searching- I am not sure which is more appropriate (if any). I realize that ansari-bradley and ks are more sensitive to the actual shape of the curve while wilcoxon focuses on testing for a shift of the median. I can not figure out though what is the difference between ansari-bradley and ks . Is there any important difference in the assumptions of these three tests that I should consider before choosing? Finally, and I apologize for the naivity of the question, all the ks.test(), wilcox.test () and ansari.test() expect the raw measurements for the populations and I do not need to pre-process in any way, right? ANY suggestion please? Niki [[alternative HTML version deleted]]