Empirical null distribution-based modeling of multi-class differential gene expression detection

In this paper, we study the multi-class differential gene expression detection for microarray data. We propose a likelihood-based approach to estimating an empirical null distribution to incorporate gene interactions and provide a more accurate false-positive control than the commonly used permutation or theoretical null distribution-based approach. We propose to rank important genes by p-values or local false discovery rate based on the estimated empirical null distribution. Through simulations and application to lung transplant microarray data, we illustrate the competitive performance of the proposed method.