Variance adaptive shrinkage (vash): flexible empirical Bayes estimation of variances.

ABSTRACT:

Motivation

Genomic studies often involve estimation of variances of thousands of genes (or other genomic units) from just a few measurements on each. For example, variance estimation is an important step in gene expression analyses aimed at identifying differentially expressed genes. A common approach to this problem is to use an Empirical Bayes (EB) method that assumes the variances among genes follow an inverse-gamma distribution. This distributional assumption is relatively inflexible; for example, it may not capture 'outlying' genes whose variances are considerably bigger than usual. Here we describe a more flexible EB method, capable of capturing a much wider range of distributions. Indeed, the main assumption is that the distribution of the variances is unimodal (or, as an al

SUBMITTER: Lu M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5181563 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature