Programmatically finding "significant" data points

[Philipp Pagel]

erikcw <erikwickstrom at gmail.com> wrote:
> I have a collection of ordered numerical data in a list.  The numbers
> when plotted on a line chart make a low-high-low-high-high-low (random)
> pattern.  I need an algorithm to extract the "significant" high and low
> points from this data.

I am not sure, what you mean by 'ordered' in this context. As
pointed out by Jeremy, you need to find an appropriate statistical test.
The appropriateness depend on how your data is (presumably) distributed
and what exactly you are trying to test. E.g. do te data pints come from
differetn groupos of some kind? Or are you just looking for extreme
values (outliers maybe?)?

So it's more of statistical question than a python one.

cu
	Philipp

-- 
Dr. Philipp Pagel                          Tel. +49-8161-71 2131
Dept. of Genome Oriented Bioinformatics    Fax. +49-8161-71 2186
Technical University of Munich
http://mips.gsf.de/staff/pagel