Statistical properties of the quantile normalization method for density curve alignment
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Published on: June 9, 2023
Santiago Gallón1, Jean-Michel Loubes, Elie Maza
1Departamento de Matemáticas y Estadística, Universidad de Antioquia, Medellín, Colombia. santiagog@udea.edu.co
Abstract:
The article investigates the large sample properties of the quantile normalization method by Bolstad et al. (2003) [4] which has become one of the most popular methods to align density curves in microarray data analysis. We prove consistency of this method which is viewed as a particular case of the structural expectation procedure for curve alignment, which corresponds to a notion of barycenter of measures in the Wasserstein space. Moreover, we show that, this method fails in some case of mixtures, and we propose a new methodology to cope with this issue.
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