Integrating heterogeneous microarray data sources using correlation signatures

Microarrays are one of the latest breakthroughs in experimental molecular biology. Thousands of different research groups generate tens of thousands of microarray gene expression profiles based on different tissues, species, and conditions. Combining such vast amount of microarray data sets is an important and yet challenging problem. In this paper, we introduce a "correlation signature" method that allows the coherent interpretation and integration of microarray data across disparate sources. The proposed algorithm first builds, for each gene (row) in a table, a correlation signature that captures the system-wide dependencies existing between the gene and the other genes within the table, and then compares the signatures across the tables for further analysis. We validate our framework with an experimental study using real microarray data sets, the result of which suggests that such an approach can be a viable solution for the microarray data integration and analysis problems.