Title
EMDomics: a robust and powerful method for the identification of genes differentially expressed between heterogeneous classes.
Abstract
Motivation: A major goal of biomedical research is to identify molecular features associated with a biological or clinical class of interest. Differential expression analysis has long been used for this purpose; however, conventional methods perform poorly when applied to data with high within class heterogeneity. Results: To address this challenge, we developed EMDomics, a new method that uses the Earth mover's distance to measure the overall difference between the distributions of a gene's expression in two classes of samples and uses permutations to obtain q-values for each gene. We applied EMDomics to the challenging problem of identifying genes associated with drug resistance in ovarian cancer. We also used simulated data to evaluate the performance of EMDomics, in terms of sensitivity and specificity for identifying differentially expressed gene in classes with high within class heterogeneity. In both the simulated and real biological data, EMDomics outperformed competing approaches for the identification of differentially expressed genes, and EMDomics was significantly more powerful than conventional methods for the identification of drug resistance-associated gene sets. EMDomics represents a new approach for the identification of genes differentially expressed between heterogeneous classes and has utility in a wide range of complex biomedical conditions in which sample classes show within class heterogeneity.
Year
DOI
Venue
2016
10.1093/bioinformatics/btv634
BIOINFORMATICS
Field
DocType
Volume
Biological data,Data mining,Differential expression,Gene,Computer science,Permutation,Bioinformatics,Gene regulatory network,Gene expression profiling,R package
Journal
32
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
4
1367-4803
4
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.46
7
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Sheida Nabavi1188.68
Daniel Schmolze240.80
Mayinuer Maitituoheti340.46
Sadhika Malladi440.46
Andrew H. Beck5585.98