Identification of Differentially Expressed Genes Using Tests Based on Multiple Imputations

초록

Datasets from DNA microarray experiments, which are in the form of large matrices of expression levels of genes, often have missing values. However, the existing statistical methods including the principle components analysis (PCA) and Hotelling’s t-test are not directly applicable for the datasets having missing values due to the fact that they assume the observed dataset is complete in general. Many methods have been proposed in previous literature to impute the missing in the observed data. Troyanskaya et al. [1] study the k-nearest neighbor (kNN) imputation, Kim et al. [2] propose the local least squares (LLS) method and Rubin [3] propose the multiple imputation (MI) for missing values. To identify differentially expressed genes, we propose a new testing procedure when the missing exists in the observed data. The proposed procedure uses the Stouffer’s z-scores and combines the test results of individual imputed samples, which are dependent to each other. We numerically show that the proposed test procedure based on MI performs better than the existing test procedures based on single imputation (SI) by comparing their ROC curves. We apply the proposed method to analyzing a public microarray data.

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