As our pilot study shows (Oda et al., 2008 ), the biological contexts in a pathway affects relevance judgments by biologists.
The limitations of the traditional risk assessments include the lack of mechanistic information, uncertainty about the toxicity pathways that might potentially be affected, relevance of the endpoints of toxicity, default assumptions for dose-response extrapolations, and uncertainty about intra- and inter-species "safety factors" (Barlow et al.,2006; Edwards and Preston, 2008; Hartung, 2009).
As for weaker versions, Completeness could be limited to physical effects within the human body without affecting its relevance to the current topic.
Minor support problems arise for very high values of the estimated propensity scores, but given that the fraction of treatment units in those regions are quite small, the lack of support is marginal and will not affect the relevance of the method.
However, when we interact the parental illness variables discussed below with a measure of household wealth, the interaction effects are insignificantly different from zero (p > 0.1), and so the over-sampling of poor households is unlikely to affect the relevance of our results to Ethiopia as a whole.
This may have affected the relevance of the signature in the classification of the follicular pathologies, explaining the low percentage of genes common to the two classifiers.
Whether both of these limits affect the relevance of the rabbit model is not yet known.
This may have affected the relevance of the data we collected to this model.
To evaluate, whether our tight filtering affected biological relevance of retained 47 gene candidates, we conducted Ingenuity Pathway Analysis IPAA).
However, since this is an association study, these losses do not affect the relevance of our findings.
