Turning straw into gold: building robustness into gene signature inference
Wilson Wen Bin Goh1, Limsoon Wong2
1School of Biological Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
Abstract:
Reproducible and generalizable gene signatures are essential for clinical deployment, but are hard to come by. The primary issue is insufficient mitigation of confounders: ensuring that hypotheses are appropriate, test statistics and null distributions are appropriate, and so on. To further improve robustness, additional good analytical practices (GAPs) are needed, namely: leveraging existing data and knowledge; careful and systematic evaluation of gene sets, even if they overlap with known sources of confounding; and rigorous testing of inferred signatures against as many published data sets as possible. Here, using a re-examination of a breast cancer data set and 48 published signatures, we illustrate the value of adopting these GAPs.
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