The shrunken MAP LFCs offer a more reproducible quantification of transcriptional differences than standard MLE LFCs. To demonstrate this, we split the Bottomly et al. samples equally into two groups, I and II, such that each group contained a balanced split of the strains, simulating a scenario where an experiment (samples in group I) is performed, analyzed and reported, and then independently replicated (samples in group II). Within each group, we estimated LFCs between the strains and compared between groups I and II, using the MLE LFCs (Figure 3A) and using the MAP LFCs (Figure 3B). Because the shrinkage moves large LFCs that are not well supported by the data toward zero, the agreement between the two independent sample groups increases considerably. Therefore, shrunken fold-change estimates offer a more reliable basis for quantitative conclusions than normal MLEs.
