jackstraw 1.0

Neo Christopher Chung — Sat, 01 Feb 2014 22:53:41 -0000

There are a number of well-established methods such as principal components analysis (PCA) for automatically capturing systematic variation due to latent variables in large-scale genomic data. For example, PCA and related methods may directly provide a quantitative characterization of a complex biological variable that is otherwise difficult to precisely define or model. An unsolved problem in this context is how to systematically identify the variables that are drivers of systematic variation captured by PCA. Principal components (and other estimates of systematic variation) are directly constructed from the variables themselves, making measures of statistical significance artificially inflated when using conventional methods due to over-fitting. We introduce a new approach called the jackstraw that allows one to accurately identify variables that are statistically significantly associated with any subset or linear combination of principal components (PCs). The proposed method can greatly simplify complex significance testing problems encountered in modern high-dimensional data analysis and can be utilized to identify the variables significantly associated with latent variables.

mloss.org jackstraw

jackstraw 1.0