Identifying differential cell populations in flow cytometry data accounting for marker frequency
We introduce a new cell population score called SpecEnr (specific enrichment) and describe a method that discovers robust and accurate candidate biomarkers from flow cytometry data. Our approach identifies a new class of candidate biomarkers we define as driver cell populations, whose abundance is associated with a sample class (e.g. disease), but not as a result of a change in a related population. We show that the driver cell populations we find are also easily interpretable using a lattice-based visualization tool. Our method is implemented in the R package flowGraph, freely available on GitHub (github.com/aya49/flowGraph) and on BioConductor.
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