Title
Unsupervised assessment of microarray data quality using a Gaussian mixture model.
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Quality assessment of microarray data is an important and often challenging aspect of gene expression analysis. This task frequently involves the examination of a variety of summary statistics and diagnostic plots. The interpretation of these diagnostics is often subjective, and generally requires careful expert scrutiny. RESULTS: We show how an unsupervised classification technique based on the Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm and the naïve Bayes model can be used to automate microarray quality assessment. The method is flexible and can be easily adapted to accommodate alternate quality statistics and platforms. We evaluate our approach using Affymetrix 3' gene expression and exon arrays and compare the performance of this method to a similar supervised approach. CONCLUSION: This research illustrates the efficacy of an unsupervised classification approach for the purpose of automated microarray data quality assessment. Since our approach requires only unannotated training data, it is easy to customize and to keep up-to-date as technology evolves. In contrast to other "black box" classification systems, this method also allows for intuitive explanations.
Year
DOI
Venue
2009
10.1186/1471-2105-10-191
BMC Bioinformatics
Keywords
Field
DocType
gene expression analysis,gene expression,gaussian mixture model,classification system,computational biology,microarray data,algorithms,expectation maximization,gene expression profiling,normal distribution,em algorithm,microarrays,bioinformatics
Data mining,Computer science,Microarray analysis techniques,Bioinformatics,DNA microarray,Mixture model,Gene expression profiling
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
10
1
1471-2105
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
16
0.37
17
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Brian E. Howard1264.24
Beate Sick2403.57
Steffen Heber321922.88