QVALITY: non-parametric estimation of q-values and posterior error probabilities

Bioinformatics. 2009 Apr 1;25(7):964-6. doi: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btp021. Epub 2009 Feb 4.

Abstract

Qvality is a C++ program for estimating two types of standard statistical confidence measures: the q-value, which is an analog of the p-value that incorporates multiple testing correction, and the posterior error probability (PEP, also known as the local false discovery rate), which corresponds to the probability that a given observation is drawn from the null distribution. In computing q-values, qvality employs a standard bootstrap procedure to estimate the prior probability of a score being from the null distribution; for PEP estimation, qvality relies upon non-parametric logistic regression. Relative to other tools for estimating statistical confidence measures, qvality is unique in its ability to estimate both types of scores directly from a null distribution, without requiring the user to calculate p-values.

Availability: A web server, C++ source code and binaries are available under MIT license at http://noble.gs.washington.edu/proj/qvality.

Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

Publication types

  • Research Support, N.I.H., Extramural

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms*
  • Computational Biology / methods*
  • DNA / genetics
  • Oligonucleotide Array Sequence Analysis
  • Probability
  • Sequence Alignment / methods
  • Software*

Substances

  • DNA