dslice: an R package for nonparametric testing of associations with application in QTL and gene set analysis.

Abstract

Many statistical problems in bioinformatics and genetics can be formulated as the testing of associations between a categorical variable and a continuous variable. A dynamic slicing method was proposed for non-parametric dependence testing, which has been demonstrated to have higher powers compared with traditional methods such as Kolmogorov-Smirnov test. We introduce an R package dslice to facilitate the use of dynamic slicing method in bioinformatic applications such as quantitative trait loci study and gene set enrichment analysis. dslice is implemented in Rcpp and available in the Comprehensive R Archive Network. The package is distributed under the GNU General Public License (version 2 or later).