Direct estimation and inference of higher-level correlations from lower-level measurements with applications in gene-pathway and proteomics studies

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Wang, Yue, Shi, Haoran
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Wang, Yue
Shi, Haoran
author_facet Wang, Yue
Shi, Haoran
contents This paper tackles the challenge of estimating correlations between higher-level biological variables (e.g., proteins and gene pathways) when only lower-level measurements are directly observed (e.g., peptides and individual genes). Existing methods typically aggregate lower-level data into higher-level variables and then estimate correlations based on the aggregated data. However, different data aggregation methods can yield varying correlation estimates as they target different higher-level quantities. Our solution is a latent factor model that directly estimates these higher-level correlations from lower-level data without the need for data aggregation. We further introduce a shrinkage estimator to ensure the positive definiteness and improve the accuracy of the estimated correlation matrix. Furthermore, we establish the asymptotic normality of our estimator, enabling efficient computation of p-values for the identification of significant correlations. The effectiveness of our approach is demonstrated through comprehensive simulations and the analysis of proteomics and gene expression datasets. We develop the R package highcor for implementing our method.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2407_07809
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Direct estimation and inference of higher-level correlations from lower-level measurements with applications in gene-pathway and proteomics studies
Wang, Yue
Shi, Haoran
Methodology
This paper tackles the challenge of estimating correlations between higher-level biological variables (e.g., proteins and gene pathways) when only lower-level measurements are directly observed (e.g., peptides and individual genes). Existing methods typically aggregate lower-level data into higher-level variables and then estimate correlations based on the aggregated data. However, different data aggregation methods can yield varying correlation estimates as they target different higher-level quantities. Our solution is a latent factor model that directly estimates these higher-level correlations from lower-level data without the need for data aggregation. We further introduce a shrinkage estimator to ensure the positive definiteness and improve the accuracy of the estimated correlation matrix. Furthermore, we establish the asymptotic normality of our estimator, enabling efficient computation of p-values for the identification of significant correlations. The effectiveness of our approach is demonstrated through comprehensive simulations and the analysis of proteomics and gene expression datasets. We develop the R package highcor for implementing our method.
title Direct estimation and inference of higher-level correlations from lower-level measurements with applications in gene-pathway and proteomics studies
topic Methodology
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.07809