Entering edit mode
Hi everybody.
I have a set of only 5 samples of Illumina27k methylation data. We
have extracted some info from the probes, but now the researcher in
charge of the project wants something that could support his idea of
the five samples to be practically equivalent wrt to their methylation
levels.
I know that the sample is quite small. Intuitively, if you plot
densities from the 5 samples, they are almost equal. Problem is, I do
not know a way in which I could give a statistical significance about
this fact (yes, as always, there is the "I need a p-value" problem).
1) I did PCA on both beta values and m-values, and found that the
first principal component accounts for between 90 and 91% of the total
variance. In the biplot, the five samples appear to be very close.
2) I asked for advice to a statistician friend, and we tried to do the
following: probe by probe, we tried a Leave-One-Out approach, by
calculating a confidence interval for 4 of the samples and seeing if
the remaining probe falls within the interval. Then, for each probe, I
summed the number of times a methylation value fell out of the
confInt, only to find out that nearly 53% of the probes contain -in
this sense- 'outliers'.
At first it surprised me, but then I noticed -by plotting the outliers
against the samples- that these 'outliers' were uniformly distributed
among samples, which I think is again intuitive, i.e., there are
indeed differences (statistical differences, maybe not biological)
among samples, but there is no global difference of one of the samples
w.r.t. the others.
These differences might be related to technical noise, so I was
thinking of imposing a minimum difference in order to test again for
outliers. Would this be ok?
Is there any method I can use to try to show there is no difference
among the samples? Or should I stay with the graphs and the intuitive
description on the text?
Thanks. Any help or hint would be much appreciated.
Regards,
Gustavo
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