An adaptive approach to denoising tandem mass spectra

In our recent work on denoising, a linear combination of five features was used to adjust the peak intensities in tandem mass spectra. Although the method showed a promise, the coefficients (weights) of the linear combination were fixed and determined empirically. In this paper, we proposed an adaptive approach for estimating these weights. The proposed approach: (i) calculates the score for each peak in a data set with the previous empirically determined weights, (ii) selects the training data set based on the scores of peaks, (iii) applies the linear discriminant analysis to the training data set and takes the solution of linear discriminant analysis as the new weights, (iv) calculates the score again with the new weights, (v) repeats (ii)-(iv) until the weights have no significant change. After getting the final weights, the proposed approach follows the previous methods. The proposed approach was applied to two tandem mass spectra data sets: ISB (with low resolution) and TOV-Q (with high resolution) to evaluate its performance. The results show that about 66% of peaks (likely noise peaks) can be removed and that the number of peptides identified by MASCOT increases by 14 and 23.4% for ISB and TOV-Q data set, respectively, compared to the previous work.