Multivariate approach to the analysis of correlated RNA-seq data

Abstract

High-throughput RNA-seq technology has emerged as a powerful tool for understanding the molecular basis of phenotype variation in biology, including disease. Recently, some correlated RNA-seq datasets started to be generated. While there have been several approaches proposed for identifying the differentially expressed genes (DEGs), not many methods can analyze correlated RNA-seq data. We expect the simultaneous analysis of correlated RNA-seq data to increase of power of detecting DEGs. In this paper, we propose a multivariate method to find DEGs on correlated RNA-seq data based on the Generalized Estimating Equations (GEE) approach. The advantage of the proposed method is to consider correlated RNA-seq data simultaneously while accounting for correlations. Through real data analysis and simulation studies, we show that our multivariate approach has higher power of detecting DEGs than the existing methods.