DGEclust: differential expression analysis of clustered count data

Abstract

Most published studies on the statistical analysis of count data generated by next-generation sequencing technologies have paid surprisingly little attention on cluster analysis. We present a statistical methodology (DGEclust) for clustering digital expression data, which (contrary to alternative methods) simultaneously addresses the problem of model selection (i.e. how many clusters are supported by the data) and uncertainty in parameter estimation. We show how this methodology can be utilised in differential expression analysis and we demonstrate its applicability on a more general class of problems and higher accuracy, when compared to popular alternatives. DGEclust is freely available at https://bitbucket.org/DimitrisVavoulis/dgeclust