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How To Identify Quantile Normalized Expression Data

Hi,

I have miRNA microarray expression data. It's claimed that it's quantile normalized, but I'm are not sure about it. is there any method to check this?

statistics

Do you mean as opposed to having been normalized by other methods than quantile, or as opposed to having been normalized at all?

1 answer

This depends on the answer to jobinv's question in the comments on your post, but I suspect you just mean "has (any) normalization been performed?". To simply determine if a normalization procedure has been run, just dump the values and assess the data yourself:

Raw data ...

... is background corrected ...

... and then quantile normalized

You can also just assess the average expression of all probes/probesets for each array - any large deviance would suggest you're not looking at processed data.

To elaborate a little: you need to generate a boxplot where x-axis = samples, y-axis = intensities. Quantile-normalized data has approximately equal medians, upper and lower quantiles.

great. let's consider a case, where data is normalized, but we don't know which normalization method are used . how I can detect it ?

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