Many researchers are concerned with the comparability and reliability of microarray gene expression data. Recent completion of the MicroArray Quality Control (MAQC) project provides a unique opportunity to assess reproducibility across multiple sites and the comparability across multiple platforms. The MAQC analysis presented for the conclusion of inter- and intra-platform comparability/reproducibility of microarray gene expression measurements is inadequate. We evaluate the reproducibility/comparability of the MAQC data for 12901 common genes in four titration samples generated from five high-density one-color microarray platforms and the TaqMan technology. We discuss some of the problems with the use of correlation coefficient as metric to evaluate the inter- and intra-platform reproducibility and the percent of overlapping genes (POG) as a measure for evaluation of a gene selection procedure by MAQC.

Motivation: Gene class testing (GCT) or gene set analysis (GSA) is a statistical approach to determine whether some functionally predefined sets of genes express differently under different experimental conditions. Shortcomings of the Fisher's exact test for the overrepresentation analysis are illustrated by an example. Most alternative GSA methods are developed for data collected from two experimental conditions, and most is based on a univariate gene-by-gene test statistic or assume independence among genes in the gene set. A multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) approach is proposed for studies with two or more experimental conditions. Results: When the number of genes in the gene set is greater than the number of samples, the sample covariance matrix is singular and ill-condition. The use of standard multivariate methods can result in biases in the analysis. The proposed MANOVA test uses a shrinkage covariance matrix estimator for the sample covariance matrix. The MANOVA test and six other GSA published methods, principal component analysis, SAM-GS, analysis of covariance, Global, GSEA and MaxMean, are evaluated using simulation. The MANOVA test appears to perform the best in terms of control of type I error and power under the models considered in the simulation. Several publicly available microarray datasets under two and three experimental conditions are analyzed for illustrations of GSA. Most methods, except for GSEA and MaxMean, generally are comparable in terms of power of identification of significant gene sets. Availability: A free R-code to perform MANOVA test is available at http://mail.cmu.edu.tw/~catsai/research.htm Contact: jamesj.chen@fda.hhs.gov; catsai@mail.cmu.edu.tw Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

Motivation: A microarray experiment is a multi-step process, and each step is a potential source of variation. There are two major sources of variation: biological variation and technical variation. This study presents a variance-components approach to investigating animal-to-animal, between-array, within-array and day-to-day variations for two data sets. The first data set involved estimation of technical variances for pooled control and pooled treated RNA samples. The variance components included between-array, and two nested within-array variances: between-section (the upper- and lower-sections of the array are replicates) and within-section (two adjacent spots of the same gene are printed within each section). The second experiment was conducted on four different weeks. Each week there were reference and test samples with a dye-flip replicate in two hybridization days. The variance components included week-to-week, animal-to-animal and between-array and within-array variances. Results: We applied the linear mixed-effects model to quantify different sources of variation. In the first data set, we found that the between-array variance is greater than the between-section variance, which, in turn, is greater than the within-section variance. In the second data set, for the reference samples, the week-to-week variance is larger than the between-array variance, which, in turn, is slightly larger than the within-array variance. For the test samples, the week-to-week variance has the largest variation. The animal-to-animal variance is slightly larger than the between-array and within-array variances. However, in a gene-by-gene analysis, the animal-to-animal variance is smaller than the between-array variance in four out of five housekeeping genes. In summary, the largest variation observed is the week-to-week effect. Another important source of variability is the animal-to-animal variation. Finally, we describe the use of variance-component estimates to determine optimal numbers of animals, arrays per animal and sections per array in planning microarray experiments.

Standard classification algorithms are generally designed to maximize the number of correct predictions (concordance). The criterion of maximizing the concordance may not be appropriate in certain applications. In practice, some applications may emphasize high sensitivity (e.g., clinical diagnostic tests) and others may emphasize high specificity (e.g., epidemiology screening studies). This paper considers effects of the decision threshold on sensitivity, specificity, and concordance for four classification methods: logistic regression, classification tree, Fisher's linear discriminant analysis, and a weighted k-nearest neighbor. We investigated the use of decision threshold adjustment to improve performance of either sensitivity or specificity of a classifier under specific conditions. We conducted a Monte Carlo simulation showing that as the decision threshold increases, the sensitivity decreases and the specificity increases; but, the concordance values in an interval around the maximum concordance are similar. For specified sensitivity and specificity levels, an optimal decision threshold might be determined in an interval around the maximum concordance that meets the specified requirement. Three example data sets were analyzed for illustrations.