A weighted exact test for mutually exclusive mutations in cancer.

ABSTRACT:

Motivation

The somatic mutations in the pathways that drive cancer development tend to be mutually exclusive across tumors, providing a signal for distinguishing driver mutations from a larger number of random passenger mutations. This mutual exclusivity signal can be confounded by high and highly variable mutation rates across a cohort of samples. Current statistical tests for exclusivity that incorporate both per-gene and per-sample mutational frequencies are computationally expensive and have limited precision.

Results

We formulate a weighted exact test for assessing the significance of mutual exclusivity in an arbitrary number of mutational events. Our test conditions on the number of samples with a mutation as well as per-event, per-sample mutation probabilities. We pro

SUBMITTER: Leiserson MD 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5013919 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature