a normalized tree index for identification of correlated clinical parameters in microarray experiments规范化树索引相关临床参数识别的微阵列实验.pdfVIP

Martin et al. BioData Mining 2011, 4:2 /content/4/1/2 BioData Mining RESEARCH Open Access A Normalized Tree Index for identification of correlated clinical parameters in microarray experiments 1,2* 3 4 1 Christian W Martin , Anika Tauchen , Anke Becker , Tim W Nattkemper * Correspondence: Abstract christianwolfgangmartin@gmail. com Background: Measurements on gene level are widely used to gain new insights in 1University of Bielefeld, Faculty of Technology, Biodata Mining complex diseases e.g. cancer. A promising approach to understand basic biological Applied Neuroinformatics Group, mechanisms is to combine gene expression profiles and classical clinical parameters. P.O.-Box 100131, D-33501 Bielefeld, However, the computation of a correlation coefficient between high-dimensional Germany data and such parameters is not covered by traditional statistical methods. Methods: We propose a novel index, the Normalized Tree Index (NTI), to compute a correlation coefficient between the clustering result of high-dimensional microarray data and nominal clinical parameters. The NTI detects correlations between hierarchically clustered microarray data and nominal clinical parameters (labels) and gives a measurement of significance in terms of an empiric p-value of the identified correlations. Therefore, the microarray data is clustered by hierarchical agglomerative