Some thoughts on counts in sequencing studies

Juan José Egozcue; Jan Graffelman; M Isabel Ortego; Vera Pawlowsky-Glahn

doi:10.1093/nargab/lqaa094

Some thoughts on counts in sequencing studies

NAR Genom Bioinform. 2020 Nov 20;2(4):lqaa094. doi: 10.1093/nargab/lqaa094. eCollection 2020 Dec.

Authors

Juan José Egozcue¹, Jan Graffelman², M Isabel Ortego¹, Vera Pawlowsky-Glahn³

Affiliations

¹ Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya, Barcelona, 08034 Spain.
² Department of Statistics and Operations Research, Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya, Barcelona, 08034 Spain.
³ Department of Computer Sciences, Applied Mathematics and Statistics, Universitat de Girona, Campus Montilivi, 17003 Girona, Spain.

Abstract

Measurements in sequencing studies are mostly based on counts. There is a lack of theoretical developments for the analysis and modelling of this type of data. Some thoughts in this direction are presented, which might serve as a seed. The main issues addressed are the compositional character of multinomial probabilities and the corresponding representation in orthogonal (isometric) coordinates, and modelling distributions for sequencing data taking into account possible effects of amplification techniques.