RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 DiffVar: A new method for detecting differential variability with application to methylation in cancer and aging
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 008847
DO 10.1101/008847
A1 Belinda Phipson
A1 Alicia Oshlack
YR 2014
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2014/09/06/008847.abstract
AB Methylation of DNA is known to be essential to development and dramatically altered in cancers. The Illumina HumanMethylation450 BeadChip has been used extensively as a cost-effective way to profile nearly half a million CpG sites across the human genome. Here we present DiffVar, a novel method to test for differential variability between sample groups. DiffVar employs an empirical Bayes model framework that can take into account any experimental design and is robust to outliers. We applied DiffVar to several datasets from The Cancer Genome Atlas, as well as an aging dataset. DiffVar is available in the missMethyl Bioconductor R package.