PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Everaert, Celine
AU  - Volders, Pieter-Jan
AU  - Morlion, Annelien
AU  - Thas, Olivier
AU  - Mestdagh, Pieter
TI  - SPECS: A non-parameteric method to identify tissue-specific molecular features for unbalanced sample groups
AID  - 10.1101/656397
DP  - 2019 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 656397
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/05/31/656397.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/05/31/656397.full
AB  - To understand biology and differences among various tissues or cell types, one typically searches for molecular features that display characteristic abundance patterns. Several specificity metrics have been introduced to identify tissue-specific molecular features, but these either require an equal number of replicates per tissue or they can’t handle replicates at all. We describe a non-parametric specificity score that is compatible with unequal sample group sizes. To demonstrate its usefulness, the specificity score was calculated on all GTEx samples, detecting known and novel tissue-specific genes. A webtool was developed to browse these results for genes or tissues of interest. An example python implementation of SPECS is available at https://github.ugent.be/ceeverae/SPECs. The precalculated SPECS results on the GTEx data are available through a user-friendly browser at specs.cmgg.be.