The invention relates to the selection of portfolios of diagnostic markers.
A few single gene diagnostic markers such as her-2-neu are currently in use. Usually, however, diseases are not easily diagnosed with molecular diagnostics for one particular gene. Multiple markers are often required and the number of such markers that may be included in a assay based on differential gene modulation can be large, even in the hundreds of genes. It is desirable to group markers into portfolios so that the most reliable results are obtained using the smallest number of markers necessary to obtain such a result. This is particularly true in assays that contain multiple steps such as nucleic acid amplification steps.