In doing background research on who else in the scientific world might be investigating gene expression in viral infection, I've come across a whole different bunch of people and even a new scientific discipline I hadn't heard of before - ecoimmunology. They've noted that there are major differences between individuals, according to sex, age, species , and even across different environments as to the incidence of infection. It's very variable. As far as I can tell, they haven't done any microarray studies, but the reason for this might be that the whole business of microarray experiments is still quite complicated, and still being straightened out with better annotations being worked on as a result of continuation of research at the genome level. I think in the long run that the ecoimmunology crowd will be the right scientific environment for straightening out the viral infection variability question, rather than being centered in the bioinformatics machine learning algorithms crowd. Just my opinion, of course, so who knows? Anyway, I've got a lot of work ahead of me, so I won't be entering this challenge, though I may take a further look at the data, but not for the purpose of formal publishing.