Statistical methods for analyzing immunosignatures

BACKGROUND: Immunosignaturing is a new peptide microarray based technology for profiling of humoral immune responses. Despite new challenges, immunosignaturing gives us the opportunity to explore new and fundamentally different research questions. In addition to classifying samples based on disease status, the complex patterns and latent factors underlying immunosignatures, which we attempt to model, may have a diverse range of applications. METHODS: We investigate the utility of a number of statistical methods to determine model performance and address challenges inherent in analyzing immunosignatures. Some of these methods include exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, classical significance testing, structural equation and mixture modeling. RESULTS: We demonstrate an ability to classify samples based on disease status and show that immunosignaturing is a very promising technology for screening and presymptomatic screening of disease. In addition, we are able to model complex patterns and latent factors underlying immunosignatures. These latent factors may serve as biomarkers for disease and may play a key role in a bioinformatic method for antibody discovery. CONCLUSION: Based on this research, we lay out an analytic framework illustrating how immunosignatures may be useful as a general method for screening and presymptomatic screening of disease as well as antibody discovery.