ExactDAS: an exact test procedure for the detection of differential alternative splicing in microarray experiments

The aim of this paper is to propose a test procedure for the detection of differential alternative splicing across conditions for tiling array or exon chip data. While developed in a mixed model framework, the test procedure is exact (avoiding computational burden) and applicable to a large variety of contrasts, including several previously published ones. A simulation study is presented to evaluate the robustness and performance of the method. It is found to have a good detection power of genes under differential alternative splicing, even for five biological replicates and four probes per exon. The methodology also enables the comparison of various experimental designs through exact power curves. This is illustrated with the comparison of paired and unpaired experiments. The test procedure was applied to two publicly available cancer data sets based on exon arrays, and showed promising results.