Clarifying the scope and capabilities of ROTS in differential expression analysis

Recently, Anwar et al. introduced a method combining the ROTS reproducibility optimisation procedure with empirical Bayes variance estimation from limma. Here, we clarify several methodological aspects to support accurate interpretation of the results. We emphasise that ROTS is a general reproducibility optimisation framework rather than a single statistical test and demonstrate that benchmarking outcomes in the reported spike-in case studies are highly sensitive to analysis and evaluation choices. Furthermore, our reanalyses of the spike-in datasets do not support the reported conclusions, and we were unable to reproduce the results of the clinical Alzheimer's disease case study. These findings highlight the importance of transparent benchmarking practices and careful interpretation of comparative results.

The ROTS package is available through Bioconductor. The reanalyses were performed using the original code, with the minimal additions described in the manuscript.