A Hierarchical Semiparametric Model for Incorporating Intergene Information for Analysis of Genomic Data

Summary For analysis of genomic data, e.g., microarray data from gene expression profiling experiments, the two-component mixture model has been widely used in practice to detect differentially expressed genes. However, it naïvely imposes strong exchangeability assumptions across genes and does not make active use of a priori information about intergene relationships that is currently available, e.g., gene annotations through the Gene Ontology (GO) project. We propose a general strategy that first generates a set of covariates that summarizes the intergene information and then extends the two-component mixture model into a hierarchical semiparametric model utilizing the generated covariates through latent nonparametric regression. Simulations and analysis of real microarray data show that our method can outperform the naïve two-component mixture model.