Preserving biological heterogeneity with personalized genomics batch correction

Motivation: Sample source, procurement process, and other technical variations introduce batch effects into genomics data. Algorithms to remove these artifacts enhance differences between known biological covariates, but also carry potential concern of removing intra-group biological heterogeneity and thus any personalized genomic signatures. As a result, accurate identification of novel subtypes from batch corrected genomics data is challenging using standard algorithms designed to remove batch effects for class comparison analyses. Nor can batch effects be corrected reliably in future applications of genomics-based clinical tests, in which the biological groups are by definition unknown a priori.

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Parker HS, Leek JT, Favorov AV, Considine M, Xia X, Chavan S, Chung CH, Fertig EJ