MethylModes: computationally efficient detection of multimodal distributions in DNA methylation data

MethylModes is an R package and Shiny application to identify multimodal distributions in human DNA methylation at individual CpG sites. Multimodal distributions, which can be the result of nearby genetic variation, environmental exposures, or assay artifacts, are susceptible to confounding and important to identify for methylation analysis. MethylModes is easily incorporated into existing quality control pipelines of array-based DNA methylation data. The underlying algorithm uses kernel smoothing of probe-level data to locate the number and location of peaks. The algorithm can be parallelized across probes for efficient implementation at genome-scale. We provide a case study implementation of MethylModes in the Health and Retirement Study as well as the Airwave Health Monitoring Study.

MethylModes is available on GitHub at https://github.com/lutiffan/methylModes as an R package wrapping an R Shiny application. We include a toy dataset to validate installation. The codebase is also published on Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17448517.