OutlierD: an R package for outlier detection using quantile regression on mass spectrometry data.

Abstract

It is important to preprocess high-throughput data generated from mass spectrometry experiments in order to obtain a successful proteomics analysis. Outlier detection is an important preprocessing step. A naive outlier detection approach may miss many true outliers and instead select many non-outliers because of the heterogeneity of the variability observed commonly in high-throughput data. Because of this issue, we developed a outlier detection software program accounting for the heterogeneous variability by utilizing linear, non-linear and non-parametric quantile regression techniques. Our program was developed using the R computer language. As a consequence, it can be used interactively and conveniently in the R environment. An R package, OutlierD, is available at the Bioconductor project at http://www.bioconductor.org