title: DGW: an exploratory data analysis tool for clustering and visualisation of epigenomic marks.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Functional genomic and epigenomic research relies fundamentally on sequencing based methods like ChIP-seq for the detection of DNA-protein interactions. These techniques return large, high dimensional data sets with visually complex structures, such as multi-modal peaks extended over large genomic regions. Current tools for visualisation and data exploration represent and leverage these complex features only to a limited extent.
  
  
  RESULTS
  We present DGW, an open source software package for simultaneous alignment and clustering of multiple epigenomic marks. DGW uses Dynamic Time Warping to adaptively rescale and align genomic distances which allows to group regions of interest with similar shapes, thereby capturing the structure of epigenomic marks. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach in a simulation study and on a real epigenomic data set from the ENCODE project.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Our results show that DGW automatically recognises and aligns important genomic features such as transcription start sites and splicing sites from histone marks. DGW is available as an open source Python package.
authors.affiliation: Department of Chemical Engineering, Imperial College London, London, SW7 2AZ, UK. saulius.lukauskas13@imperial.ac.uk.
authors.forename: Saulius
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Lukauskas
authors.affiliation: Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Via Sommarive 18, Povo, I-38123, TN, Italy.
authors.forename: Roberto
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Visintainer
authors.affiliation: School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, 10 Crichton St, Edinburgh, EH8 9AB, Scotland.
authors.forename: Guido
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Sanguinetti
authors.affiliation: School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, 10 Crichton St, Edinburgh, EH8 9AB, Scotland.
authors.forename: Gabriele B
authors.initials: GB
authors.lastname: Schweikert
mesh_terms: D047369:Chromatin Immunoprecipitation; D016000:Cluster Analysis; D003198:Computer Simulation; D004247:DNA / Q000378:metabolism; D004268:DNA-Binding Proteins / Q000378:metabolism; D044127:Epigenesis, Genetic; D057890:Epigenomics / Q000379:methods*; D015894:Genome, Human; D042421:Histone Code; D006801:Humans; D007938:Leukemia / Q000235:genetics; D012984:Software
chemical_list: D004268:DNA-Binding Proteins; D004247:DNA
keywords: ChIP-seq; Clustering; Dynamic Time Warping; Epigenetics