A new gene selection procedure based on the covariance distance.
BACKGROUND
Very little attention has been given to gene selection procedures based on intergene correlation structure, which is often neglected in the context of differential gene expression analysis. We propose a statistical procedure to select genes that have different associations with others across different phenotypes. This procedure is based on a new gene association score, called the covariance distance.


RESULTS
We apply the proposed method, along with two alternative methods, to several simulated datasets and find out that our method is much more powerful than the other two. For biological data, we demonstrate that the analysis of differentially associated genes complements the analysis of differentially expressed genes. Combining both procedures provides a more comprehensive functional interpretation of the experimental results.


BACKGROUND
The code is downloadable from http://www.urmc.rochester.edu/biostat/people/faculty/hu.cfm.


BACKGROUND
Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
Hu
Rui
R
Department of Biostatistics and Computational Biology, University of Rochester, 601 Elmwood Avenue, Box 630, Rochester, NY 14642, USA. huruizg@hotmail.com
Qiu
Xing
X
Glazko
Galina
G
D019295:Computational Biology / Q000379:methods*; D030541:Databases, Genetic; D014644:Genetic Variation; D006801:Humans; D015233:Models, Statistical; D020411:Oligonucleotide Array Sequence Analysis / Q000379:methods*; D010641:Phenotype