Finding associations in a heterogeneous setting: Statistical test for aberration enrichment
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Most two-group statistical tests are implicitly looking for a broad pattern such as an overall shift in mean, median or variance between the two groups. Therefore, they operate best in settings where the effect of interest is uniformly affecting everyone in one group versus the other. In real-world applications, there are many scenarios where the effect of interest is heterogeneous. For example, a drug that works very well on only a proportion of patients and is equivalent to a placebo on the remaining patients, or a disease associated gene expression dysregulation that only occurs in a proportion of cases whereas the remaining cases have expression levels indistinguishable from the controls for the considered gene. In these examples with heterogeneous effect, we believe that using classical two-group statistical tests may not be the most powerful way to detect the signal. In this paper, we developed a statistical test targeting heterogeneous effects and demonstrated its power in a controlled simulation setting compared to existing methods. We focused on the problem of finding meaningful associations in complex genetic diseases using omics data such as gene expression, miRNA expression, and DNA methylation. In simulated and real data, we showed that our test is complementary to the traditionally used statistical tests and is able to detect disease-relevant genes with heterogeneous effects which would not be detectable with previous approaches.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.039 | 0.190 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".