The rapid adoption of high-throughput sequencing (HTS) technologies for genomic studies has resulted in a need for statistical methods to assess quantitative differences between experiments. An important task here is the analysis of RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) data with the aim of finding genes that are differentially expressed across groups of samples. This task is general: methods for it are typically also applicable for other comparative HTS assays, including chromatin immunoprecipitation sequencing, chromosome conformation capture, or counting observed taxa in metagenomic studies.
