Dataset Information

An integrated hierarchical Bayesian approach to normalizing left-censored microRNA microarray data.

ABSTRACT: BACKGROUND: MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are small endogenous ssRNAs that regulate target gene expression post-transcriptionally through the RNAi pathway. A critical pre-processing procedure for detecting differentially expressed miRNAs is normalization, aiming at removing the between-array systematic bias. Most normalization methods adopted for miRNA data are the same methods used to normalize mRNA data; but miRNA data are very different from mRNA data mainly because of possibly larger proportion of differentially expressed miRNA probes, and much larger percentage of left-censored miRNA probes below detection limit (DL). Taking the unique characteristics of miRNA data into account, we present a hierarchical Bayesian approach that integrates normalization, missing data imputation, and feature selection in the same model. RESULTS: Results from both simulation and real data seem to suggest the superiority of performance of Bayesian method over other widely used normalization methods in detecting truly differentially expressed miRNAs. In addition, our findings clearly demonstrate the necessity of miRNA data normalization, and the robustness of our Bayesian approach against the violation of standard assumptions adopted in mRNA normalization methods. CONCLUSION: Our study indicates that normalization procedures can have a profound impact on the detection of truly differentially expressed miRNAs. Although the proposed Bayesian method was formulated to handle normalization issues in miRNA data, we expect that biomarker discovery with other high-dimensional profiling techniques where there are a significant proportion of left-censored data points (e.g., proteomics) might also benefit from this approach.

SUBMITTER: Kang J

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3734108 | biostudies-literature | 2013

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

ACCESS DATA

Publications

An integrated hierarchical Bayesian approach to normalizing left-censored microRNA microarray data.

Kang Jia J Xu Ethan Yixun EY

BMC genomics 20130726

<h4>Background</h4>MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are small endogenous ssRNAs that regulate target gene expression post-transcriptionally through the RNAi pathway. A critical pre-processing procedure for detecting differentially expressed miRNAs is normalization, aiming at removing the between-array systematic bias. Most normalization methods adopted for miRNA data are the same methods used to normalize mRNA data; but miRNA data are very different from mRNA data mainly because of possibly larger proportion ...[more]

PMID: 23885888

Similar Datasets

Project description:Classical statistical methods for analyzing exposure data with values below the detection limits are well described in the occupational hygiene literature, but an evaluation of a Bayesian approach for handling such data is currently lacking. Here, we first describe a Bayesian framework for analyzing censored data. We then present the results of a simulation study conducted to compare the ?-substitution method with a Bayesian method for exposure datasets drawn from lognormal distributions and mixed lognormal distributions with varying sample sizes, geometric standard deviations (GSDs), and censoring for single and multiple limits of detection. For each set of factors, estimates for the arithmetic mean (AM), geometric mean, GSD, and the 95th percentile (X0.95) of the exposure distribution were obtained. We evaluated the performance of each method using relative bias, the root mean squared error (rMSE), and coverage (the proportion of the computed 95% uncertainty intervals containing the true value). The Bayesian method using non-informative priors and the ?-substitution method were generally comparable in bias and rMSE when estimating the AM and GM. For the GSD and the 95th percentile, the Bayesian method with non-informative priors was more biased and had a higher rMSE than the ?-substitution method, but use of more informative priors generally improved the Bayesian method's performance, making both the bias and the rMSE more comparable to the ?-substitution method. An advantage of the Bayesian method is that it provided estimates of uncertainty for these parameters of interest and good coverage, whereas the ?-substitution method only provided estimates of uncertainty for the AM, and coverage was not as consistent. Selection of one or the other method depends on the needs of the practitioner, the availability of prior information, and the distribution characteristics of the measurement data. We suggest the use of Bayesian methods if the practitioner has the computational resources and prior information, as the method would generally provide accurate estimates and also provides the distributions of all of the parameters, which could be useful for making decisions in some applications.

Project description:BackgroundPost-genomic molecular biology has resulted in an explosion of data, providing measurements for large numbers of genes, proteins and metabolites. Time series experiments have become increasingly common, necessitating the development of novel analysis tools that capture the resulting data structure. Outlier measurements at one or more time points present a significant challenge, while potentially valuable replicate information is often ignored by existing techniques.ResultsWe present a generative model-based Bayesian hierarchical clustering algorithm for microarray time series that employs Gaussian process regression to capture the structure of the data. By using a mixture model likelihood, our method permits a small proportion of the data to be modelled as outlier measurements, and adopts an empirical Bayes approach which uses replicate observations to inform a prior distribution of the noise variance. The method automatically learns the optimum number of clusters and can incorporate non-uniformly sampled time points. Using a wide variety of experimental data sets, we show that our algorithm consistently yields higher quality and more biologically meaningful clusters than current state-of-the-art methodologies. We highlight the importance of modelling outlier values by demonstrating that noisy genes can be grouped with other genes of similar biological function. We demonstrate the importance of including replicate information, which we find enables the discrimination of additional distinct expression profiles.ConclusionsBy incorporating outlier measurements and replicate values, this clustering algorithm for time series microarray data provides a step towards a better treatment of the noise inherent in measurements from high-throughput genomic technologies. Timeseries BHC is available as part of the R package 'BHC' (version 1.5), which is available for download from Bioconductor (version 2.9 and above) via http://www.bioconductor.org/packages/release/bioc/html/BHC.html?pagewanted=all.

Dataset Information

An integrated hierarchical Bayesian approach to normalizing left-censored microRNA microarray data.

Publications

An integrated hierarchical Bayesian approach to normalizing left-censored microRNA microarray data.

Similar Datasets

OmicsDI is part of the ELIXIR infrastructure

Tweets