Systematical detection of significant genes in microarray data by incorporating gene interaction relationship in biological systems.
Many methods, including parametric, nonparametric, and Bayesian methods, have been used for detecting differentially expressed genes based on the assumption that biological systems are linear, which ignores the nonlinear characteristics of most biological systems. More importantly, those methods do not simultaneously consider means, variances, and high moments, resulting in relatively high false positive rate. To overcome the limitations, the SWang test is proposed to determine differentially expressed genes according to the equality of distributions between case and control. Our method not only latently incorporates functional relationships among genes to consider nonlinear biological system but also considers the mean, variance, skewness, and kurtosis of expression profiles simultaneously. To illustrate biological significance of high moments, we construct a nonlinear gene interaction model, demonstrating that skewness and kurtosis could contain useful information of function association among genes in microarrays. Simulations and real microarray results show that false positive rate of SWang is lower than currently popular methods (T-test, F-test, SAM, and Fold-change) with much higher statistical power. Additionally, SWang can uniquely detect significant genes in real microarray data with imperceptible differential expression but higher variety in kurtosis and skewness. Those identified genes were confirmed with previous published literature or RT-PCR experiments performed in our lab.
The Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, The Institute of Biomedical Sciences, The School of Life Sciences, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China.
Junwei
J
Wang
Meiwen
M
Jia
Liping
L
Zhu
Zengjin
Z
Yuan
Peng
P
Li
Chang
C
Chang
Jian
J
Luo
Mingyao
M
Liu
Tieliu
T
Shi
D000704:Analysis of Variance; D020869:Gene Expression Profiling; D020411:Oligonucleotide Array Sequence Analysis; D020133:Reverse Transcriptase Polymerase Chain Reaction; D049490:Systems Biology