Washington University School of Medicine

Division of Biostatistics
Seminar Series Fall 2009

An Information Criterion for Order-restricted Inference and Its Application to Clustering Short Time-course Microarray Data

Nan Lin
Department of Mathematics
Washington University in St. Louis

Friday, November 6, 2009, 12:30–1:30 pm

GEMS classroom, 3rd Floor in Shriner's Building
Coffee, tea, and cookies will be provided


Abstract

Techniques of statistical inference under order restrictions have been successfully used in many areas in statistics. We consider the problem of selecting an order restriction profile out of a set of candidate profiles. Existing information criteria can only be used with simple ordering, such as monotone increasing or decreasing profiles. We developed a new information criterion for order-resticted inference applicable to general order restrictions, and showed its consistency in selecting the correct order restriction profile. This new information criterion is also successfully applied to clustering short time-course microarray data. We first define candiate gene clusters using the order restriction profile over the mean expression across time. A gene is then assigned to the best matched profile/cluster determined by our new information criterion. Compared to other existing clustering algorithms for short time-course microarray data, the information criterion-based clustering provides competitive clustering accuracy and is computationally more efficient.