Entering edit mode
Hey Bioconductor Users,
I just wanted to give you all a 'heads-up' on a new package (SCAN.UPC)
that appeared in last week's release of Bioconductor. In the The SCAN
normalization is a new single sample Affy normalization approach that
only requires information within the sample, and does not need other
samples or a set of reference samples for the normalization. The great
thing about this is that it means that once you normalize the array
once, the normalized values won't change if other arrays are added to
the expression set. This has great utility in meta-analysis and in
personalized medicine applications.
The details of our SCAN method can be found here
(http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0888754312001632).
SCAN removes background variation and increases the signal-to-noise
ratio in the samples. We are seeing instances where batch effects are
removed or reduced from batches of data as well. The method is a major
and uniform upgrade over RMA, and is showing slightly better or
equivalent results compared to fRMA. The advantage over fRMA is that
you don't need to provide a frozen reference vector for the
normalization--which is difficult for some arrays and applications.
Also we are seeing improved performance when combining across Affy
array platforms because fRMA will need different frozen vectors for
the different array platforms.
Please let us know if you have any issues with the package. We are
happy to help!
Evan