CiteULike is a free online bibliography manager. Register and you can start organising your references online.

A robust measure of correlation between two genes on a microarray Export

BMC Bioinformatics, Vol. 8, No. 1. (25 June 2007), 220.

Citation Format

[Posts]

View FullText article


GeeSharpMinor's tags for this article

analysis clustering correlation microarray

X Reviews [Write a review of this article]

X Find related articles from these CiteULike users

X Find related articles with these CiteULike tags

X Posting History

X Abstract

BACKGROUND:The underlying goal of microarray experiments is to identify gene expression patterns across different experimental conditions. Genes that are contained in a particular pathway or that respond similarly to experimental conditions could be co-expressed and show similar patterns of expression on a microarray. Using any of a variety of clustering methods or gene network analyses we can partition genes of interest into groups, clusters, or modules based on measures of similarity. Typically, Pearson correlation is used to measure distance (or similarity) before implementing a clustering algorithm. Pearson correlation is quite susceptible to outliers, however, an unfortunate characteristic when dealing with microarray data (well known to be typically quite noisy.)RESULTS:We propose a resistant similarity metric based on Tukey's biweight estimate of multivariate scale and location. The resistant metric is simply the correlation obtained from a resistant covariance matrix of scale. We give results which demonstrate that our correlation metric is much more resistant than the Pearson correlation while being more efficient than other nonparametric measures of correlation (e.g., Spearman correlation.) Additionally, our method gives a systematic gene flagging procedure which is useful when dealing with large amounts of noisy data.CONCLUSION:When dealing with microarray data, which are known to be quite noisy, robust methods should be used. Specifically, robust distances, including the biweight correlation, should be used in clustering and gene network analysis.


X BibTeX record

X RIS record


Privacy Statement | Terms & Conditions
CiteULike organises scholarly (or academic) papers or literature and provides bibliographic (which means it makes bibliographies) for universities and higher education establishments. It helps undergraduates and postgraduates. People studying for PhDs or in postdoctoral (postdoc) positions. The service is similar in scope to EndNote or RefWorks or any other reference manager like BibTeX, but it is a social bookmarking service for scientists and humanities researchers.