Improved moderation for gene-wise variance estimation in RNA-Seq via the exploitation of external information

摘要

BackgroundThe cost of RNA-Seq has been decreasing over the last few years. Despite this, experiments with four or less biological replicates are still quite common. Estimating the variances of gene expression estimates becomes both a challenging and interesting problem in these situations of low replication. However, with the wealth of microarray and other publicly available gene expression data readily accessible on public repositories, these sources of information can be leveraged to make improvements in variance estimation.