articleGenome biologyMar 15, 2022GOLD OA

Exaggerated false positives by popular differential expression methods when analyzing human population samples

University of California, Irvine · University of California, Los Angeles · +1 more institution

PubMed
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Abstract

When identifying differentially expressed genes between two conditions using human population RNA-seq samples, we found a phenomenon by permutation analysis: two popular bioinformatics methods, DESeq2 and edgeR, have unexpectedly high false discovery rates. Expanding the analysis to limma-voom, NOISeq, dearseq, and Wilcoxon rank-sum test, we found that FDR control is often failed except for the Wilcoxon rank-sum test. Particularly, the actual FDRs of DESeq2 and edgeR sometimes exceed 20% when the target FDR is 5%. Based on these results, for population-level RNA-seq studies with large sample sizes, we recommend the Wilcoxon rank-sum test.

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Authors

5

Topics & keywords

Keywords
  • Wilcoxon signed-rank test
  • False discovery rate
  • Biology
  • Bonferroni correction
  • False positive paradox
  • Multiple comparisons problem
  • Population
  • Statistical hypothesis testing
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