Comparison of High-Level Microarray Analysis Methods in the Context of Result Consistency

Abstract

We found a very low level concordance of results from tested methods on real array sets. The number of common DEGs (detected by all six methods on fixed array sets, checked on eight array sets) ranged from 6 to 433 (22,283 total array readings). Results on artificial data sets were better than those on the real data. However, they were not fully satisfying. We scored tested methods on accuracy, recall, precision, f-measure and Matthews correlation coefficient. Based on the overall scoring, the best methods were SAM and LIMMA. We also found TT to be acceptable. The worst scoring was MW. Based on our study, we recommend: 1. Carefully taking into account the need for study when choosing a method, 2. Making high-level analysis with more than one method and then only taking the genes that are common to all methods (which seems to be reasonable) and 3. Being very careful (while summarizing facts) about sets of differentially expressed genes: different methods discover different sets of DEGs.