To facilitate the analysis of experiments and studies with multiple samples, Bioconductor defines the SummarizedExperiment class. The computed summaries for the ranges are compiled into a rectangular array whose rows correspond to the ranges and whose columns correspond to the different samples (Fig. 2). For a typical experiment, there can be tens of thousands to millions of ranges and from a handful to hundreds of samples. The array elements do not need to be single numbers: the summaries can be multivariate.
