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Article
Testing Differentially Methylated Regions through Functional Principal Component Analysis
Journal of Applied Statistics
  • Mohamed Milad
  • Gayla R. Olbricht, Missouri University of Science and Technology
Abstract

DNA methylation is an epigenetic modification that plays an important role in many biological processes and diseases. Several statistical methods have been proposed to test for DNA methylation differences between conditions at individual cytosine sites, followed by a post hoc aggregation procedure to explore regional differences. While there are benefits to analyzing CpGs individually, there are both biological and statistical reasons to test entire genomic regions for differential methylation. Variability in methylation levels measured by Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS) is often observed across CpG sites in a genomic region. Evaluating meaningful changes in regional level methylation profiles between conditions over noisy site-level measurements is often difficult to implement with parametric models. To overcome these limitations, this study develops a nonparametric approach to detect predefined differentially methylated regions (DMR) based on functional principal component analysis (FPCA). The performance of this approach is compared with two alternative methods (GIFT and M3D), using real and simulated data.

Department(s)
Mathematics and Statistics
Research Center/Lab(s)
Center for High Performance Computing Research
Second Research Center/Lab
Intelligent Systems Center
Publication Status
Latest articles: Article accepted for publication in this journal but not yet published in a volume/issue.
Keywords and Phrases
  • DNA methylation,
  • epigenetics,
  • Functional principal component,
  • next-generation sequencing
Document Type
Article - Journal
Document Version
Citation
File Type
text
Language(s)
English
Rights
© 2021 The Authors, All rights reserved.
Publication Date
1-1-2021
Publication Date
01 Jan 2021
Citation Information
Mohamed Milad and Gayla R. Olbricht. "Testing Differentially Methylated Regions through Functional Principal Component Analysis" Journal of Applied Statistics (2021) ISSN: 0266-4763; 1360-0532
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/gayla-olbricht/63/