Abstract

The causes of many complex human diseases are still largely unknown. Genetics plays an important role in uncovering the molecular mechanisms of complex human diseases. A key step to characterize the genetics of a complex human disease is to unbiasedly identify disease-associated gene transcripts in whole-genome scale. Confounding factors could cause false positives. Paired design, such as measuring gene expression before and after treatment for the same subject, can reduce the effect of known confounding factors. Model-based clustering, such as mixtures of Bayesian hierarchical models, has been proposed to detect gene transcripts differentially expressed between paired samples. However, not all known confounding factors can be controlled in a paired/match design. To the best of our knowledge, no clustering methods have the capacity to adjust for the effects of covariates yet. In this article, we proposed a novel mixture of Bayesian hierarchical models with covariate adjustment in identifying differentially expressed transcripts using high-throughput whole-genome data from paired design. Both simulation study and real data analysis show the good performance of the proposed method