BackgroundTime-course microarray experiments are widely used to study the temporal profiles of gene expression. Storey et al. (2005) developed a method for analyzing time-course microarray studies that can be applied to discovering genes whose expression trajectories change over time within a single biological group, or those that follow different time trajectories among multiple groups. They estimated the expression trajectories of each gene using natural cubic splines under the null (no time-course) and alternative (time-course) hypotheses, and used a goodness of fit test statistic to quantify the discrepancy. The null distribution of the statistic was approximated through a bootstrap method. Gene expression levels in microarray data are often complicatedly correlated. An accurate type I error control adjusting for multiple testing requires the joint null distribution of test statistics for a large number of genes. For this purpose, permutation methods have been widely used because of computational ease and their intuitive interpretation.
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