title: Comparisons of non-Gaussian statistical models in DNA methylation analysis.
abstract: As a key regulatory mechanism of gene expression, DNA methylation patterns are widely altered in many complex genetic diseases, including cancer. DNA methylation is naturally quantified by bounded support data; therefore, it is non-Gaussian distributed. In order to capture such properties, we introduce some non-Gaussian statistical models to perform dimension reduction on DNA methylation data. Afterwards, non-Gaussian statistical model-based unsupervised clustering strategies are applied to cluster the data. Comparisons and analysis of different dimension reduction strategies and unsupervised clustering methods are presented. Experimental results show that the non-Gaussian statistical model-based methods are superior to the conventional Gaussian distribution-based method. They are meaningful tools for DNA methylation analysis. Moreover, among several non-Gaussian methods, the one that captures the bounded nature of DNA methylation data reveals the best clustering performance.
authors.affiliation: Pattern Recognition and Intelligent System Lab.,Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, No. 10 Xitucheng Road,Beijing 100876, China. mazhanyu@bupt.edu.cn.
authors.forename: Zhanyu
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Ma
authors.affiliation: Computational Systems Genomics, CAS-MPG Partner Institute for Computational Biology, Shanghai Institute for Biological Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 320 Yue Yang Road, Shanghai 200031, China. a.teschendorff@ucl.ac.uk.
authors.forename: Andrew E
authors.initials: AE
authors.lastname: Teschendorff
authors.affiliation: Pattern Recognition and Intelligent System Lab.,Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, No. 10 Xitucheng Road,Beijing 100876, China. hongyu@bupt.edu.cn.
authors.forename: Hong
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Yu
authors.affiliation: Communication Theory Lab., KTH - Royal Institute of Technology, Osquldas väg 10,10044 Stockholm, Sweden. taghia@kth.se.
authors.forename: Jalil
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Taghia
authors.affiliation: Pattern Recognition and Intelligent System Lab.,Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, No. 10 Xitucheng Road,Beijing 100876, China. guojun@bupt.edu.cn.
authors.forename: Jun
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Guo
mesh_terms: D016000:Cluster Analysis; D019175:DNA Methylation; D030541:Databases, Genetic; D015233:Models, Statistical; D016011:Normal Distribution; D025341:Principal Component Analysis