A mixture model approach for the analysis of microarray gene expression data

Microarrays have emerged as powerful tools allowing investigators to assess the expression of thousands of genes in different tissues and organisms. Statistical treatment of the resulting data remains a substantial challenge. Investigators using microarray expression studies may wish to answer questions about the statistical significance of differences in expression of any of the genes under study, avoiding false positive and false negative results. We have developed a sequence of procedures involving finite mixture modeling and bootstrap inference to address these issues in studies involving many thousands of genes. We illustrate the use of these techniques with a dataset involving calorically restricted mice. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.