Cross Platform Data Analysis in Microarray Experiment

With the rapid accumulation of microarray data, it is a significant challenge to integrate available data sets addressing the same biological questions that can provide more samples and better experimental results. Sometimes, different microarray platforms make it difficult to effectively integrate data from several studies and there is no consensus on which method is the best to produce a single and unified data set. Methods using median rank score, quantile discretization and standardization (which directly combine rescaled gene expression values) and meta-analysis (which combine the results of individual studies at the interpretative level) are reviewed. Real data examples downloaded from GEO are used to compare the performance of these methods and to evaluate if the combined data set detects more reliable information from the separated data sets or not.