Integrating mean and variance heterogeneities to identify differentially expressed genes

BACKGROUND: In functional genomics studies, tests on mean heterogeneity have been widely employed to identify differentially expressed genes with distinct mean expression levels under different experimental conditions. Variance heterogeneity (aka, the difference between condition-specific variances) of gene expression levels is simply neglected or calibrated for as an impediment. The mean heterogeneity in the expression level of a gene reflects one aspect of its distribution alteration; and variance heterogeneity induced by condition change may reflect another aspect. Change in condition may alter both mean and some higher-order characteristics of the distributions of expression levels of susceptible genes. RESULTS: In this report, we put forth a conception of mean-variance differentially expressed (MVDE) genes, whose expression means and variances are sensitive to the change in experimental condition. We mathematically proved the null independence of existent mean heterogeneity tests and variance heterogeneity tests. Based on the independence, we proposed an integrative mean-variance test (IMVT) to combine gene-wise mean heterogeneity and variance heterogeneity induced by condition change. The IMVT outperformed its competitors under comprehensive simulations of normality and Laplace settings. For moderate samples, the IMVT well controlled type I error rates, and so did existent mean heterogeneity test (i.e., the Welch t test (WT), the moderated Welch t test (MWT)) and the procedure of separate tests on mean and variance heterogeneities (SMVT), but the likelihood ratio test (LRT) severely inflated type I error rates. In presence of variance heterogeneity, the IMVT appeared noticeably more powerful than all the valid mean heterogeneity tests. Application to the gene profiles of peripheral circulating B raised solid evidence of informative variance heterogeneity. After adjusting for background data structure, the IMVT replicated previous discoveries and identified novel experiment-wide significant MVDE genes. CONCLUSIONS: Our results indicate tremendous potential gain of integrating informative variance heterogeneity after adjusting for global confounders and background data structure. The proposed informative integration test better summarizes the impacts of condition change on expression distributions of susceptible genes than do the existent competitors. Therefore, particular attention should be paid to explicitly exploit the variance heterogeneity induced by condition change in functional genomics analysis. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12859-016-1393-y) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.