RECAP reveals the true statistical significance of ChIP-seq peak calls

Chromatin Immunopreciptation (ChIP)-seq is used extensively to identify sites of transcription factor binding or regions of epigenetic modifications to the genome. A key step in ChIP-seq analysis is peak calling, where genomic regions enriched for ChIP versus control reads are identified. Many programs have been designed to solve this task, but nearly all fall into the statistical trap of using the data twice-once to determine candidate enriched regions, and again to assess enrichment by classical statistical hypothesis testing. This double use of the data invalidates the statistical significance assigned to enriched regions, thus the true significance or reliability of peak calls remains unknown.

Using simulated and real ChIP-seq data, we show that three well-known peak callers, MACS, SICER and diffReps, output biased P-values and false discovery rate estimates that can be many orders of magnitude too optimistic. We propose a wrapper algorithm, RECAP, that uses resampling of ChIP-seq and control data to estimate a monotone transform correcting for biases built into peak calling algorithms. When applied to null hypothesis data, where there is no enrichment between ChIP-seq and control, P-values recalibrated by RECAP are approximately uniformly distributed. On data where there is genuine enrichment, RECAP P-values give a better estimate of the true statistical significance of candidate peaks and better false discovery rate estimates, which correlate better with empirical reproducibility. RECAP is a powerful new tool for assessing the true statistical significance of ChIP-seq peak calls.

The RECAP software is available through www.perkinslab.ca or on github at https://github.com/theodorejperkins/RECAP.

Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.