edgeR, very big lib.size makes CPM very small

Vang Quy Le / Region Nordjylland <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.science.biology.informatics.conductor
Message-ID <[email protected]>
Hello,
I am working with count table that has very big lib.size:
> [email protected][[2]]$lib.size
[1] 3.2e+08 4.2e+08 4.5e+08 3.8e+08 2.3e+08 2.1e+08 3.3e+08 2.8e+08


This causes CPM very small, and consequently very negative logCPM. This is 'head' of my  cpm(counts):

            C1     C2     C3     C4     T1    T2    T3     T4
00000001 0.000 0.0000 0.0000 0.0026 0.0042 0.000 0.000 0.0035
00000002 0.012 0.0092 0.0086 0.0103 0.0042 0.014 0.006 0.0070
00000003 0.073 0.0554 0.0474 0.0620 0.0584 0.056 0.057 0.0525
00000004 0.073 0.0624 0.0496 0.0620 0.0626 0.056 0.060 0.0525
00000005 0.076 0.0624 0.0496 0.0594 0.0584 0.056 0.060 0.0490
00000006 0.067 0.0624 0.0474 0.0620 0.0584 0.046 0.066 0.0630


The point that concerns me here is the effect number of decimal places and rounding of numbers may lose sensitivity. Is this something that can effect the outcome of analysis? If it does, should I just scale the counts up before putting the data through my workflow?  


##### body of 'cpm' function/method #######
{
    x <- as.matrix(x)
    if (is.null(lib.size)) 
        lib.size <- colSums(x)
    if (log) {
        prior.count.scaled <- lib.size/mean(lib.size) * prior.count
        lib.size <- lib.size + 2 * prior.count.scaled
    }
    lib.size <- 1e-06 * lib.size
    if (log) 
        log2(t((t(x) + prior.count.scaled)/lib.size))
    else t(t(x)/lib.size)
}


Kind regards,

Vang Quy Le
Bioinformatician, Molecular Biologist, PhD

+45 97 66 56 29
[email protected]

AALBORG UNIVERSITY HOSPITAL
Section for Molecular Diagnostics,
Clinical Biochemistry
Reberbansgade
DK 9000 Aalborg
www.aalborguh.rn.dk

_______________________________________________
Bioconductor mailing list
[email protected]
https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/bioconductor
Search the archives: http://news.gmane.org/gmane.science.biology.informatics.conductor
lmpx.com only provides a reader for public news (NNTP) servers. It is not affiliated with the servers or forums shown here and is not responsible for the content of articles, which is written by their respective authors.