title: Response to: Correcting for cell-type effects in DNA methylation studies: reference-based method outperforms latent variable approaches in empirical studies.
abstract: We thank Hattab and colleagues for their correspondence and their investigation of cell-type mixture correction methods in methyl-CG binding domain sequencing. Here, we speculate on why surrogate variable analysis (SVA) performed differently between their two data sets, and poorly in one of them.Please see related Correspondence article: https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10/1186/s13059-017-1148-8 and related Research article: https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13059-016-0935-y.
authors.affiliation: Lady Davis Institute for Medical Research, Jewish General Hospital, Montreal, QC, Canada.|Department of Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Occupational Health, McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada.
authors.forename: Kevin
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: McGregor
authors.affiliation: Department of Decision Sciences, HEC Montreal, Montreal, QC, Canada.
authors.forename: Aurélie
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Labbe
authors.affiliation: Lady Davis Institute for Medical Research, Jewish General Hospital, Montreal, QC, Canada. celia.greenwood@mcgill.ca.|Department of Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Occupational Health, McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada. celia.greenwood@mcgill.ca.|Departments of Oncology and Human Genetics, McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada. celia.greenwood@mcgill.ca.
authors.forename: Celia M T
authors.initials: CM
authors.lastname: Greenwood
mesh_terms: D019175:DNA Methylation