Entering edit mode
Dear Xinwei,
This is a correct result. The reason that the interaction is not
statistically significant is inherent in the log-linear model, and
hence
in the definition of interaction for this sort of model.
You are probably thinking that the cpm values are much higher for the
joint condition CX&RGF than for the other conditions, hence there
should
be a positive interaction, and this should be statistically
significant.
Indeed, had you tested the joint condition vs the other three
conditions
it would certainly be significantly higher.
However the interaction is different. The problem is that there are
zero
counts for the controls. Hence the fold change from control to CX is
infinity, and the fold change from control to RGF is infinity. Hence
the
counts in the joint condition can be indefinitely large even the
absence
of any positive interaction. Hence there is no evidence for any
positive
interaction. In fact, you could make the counts for the CX&RGF
libraries
as large as you like, and the interaction would never become
significant.
To make this clear, the counts could have been:
0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 1 1e10 1e10 1e10
and this would not give a significant interaction. So long as there
are
zero counts for the controls, and least one count for the single
treatments CX and RGF, the interaction will never become significant.
You should ignore the logFC in this case, because the interaction
logFC is
not defined in any meaningful way for this data.
On the other hand, if you had any positive counts for the controls,
then
the interaction would suddenly become significant, because the fold
changes from control to CX and control to RGF would now be finite.
I suspect that you might find it more meaningful to test for
CX&RGF - (control+CX+RGF)/3
This will certainly be significant. Or else test for CX&RGF vs each
of
the other three individually.
As I've said before, I am not a fan of factorial interaction models
for
genomic data, and this is yet another example of why this is so.
Best wishes
Gordon
On Wed, 28 Aug 2013, Xinwei Han wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I manually checked p-values from edgeR and found the p-value of this
> particular gene, AT1G04500, difficult to understand. The CPM of this
> gene is like this:
>
> control replicate1: 0
> control replicate2: 0
> control replicate3: 0
> CX replicate1: 0
> CX replicate2: 0.24
> CX replicate3: 0
> RGF replicate1: 0
> RGF replicate2: 0.14
> RGF replicate3: 0.19
> CX&RGF replicate1: 25.14
> CX&RGF replicate2: 44.36
> CX&RGF replicate3: 34.62
>
> I fitted GLM with model.matrix(~RGF + CX + RGF:CX). To find out
genes
> under significant interaction effect, lrt <- glmLRT(fit, coef=4)
gives
> the following results to this gene:
>
> logFC: 5.43
> logCPM: 3.19
> LR: 0.012
> PValue: 0.91
>
> I do not understand why such dramatic change and such large logFC
have
> p-value of 0.91. I attached the data and R script I used. Could you
take
> a look to see whether I did something wrong in the script? Or there
are
> some other reasons for that?
>
> I used the latest version of R and edgeR. "ms" in the data and
script is
> the control.
>
> Thanks
> Xinwei
>
______________________________________________________________________
The information in this email is confidential and
intend...{{dropped:4}}