BiTrinA--multiscale binarization and trinarization with quality analysis.

Abstract

When processing gene expression profiles or other biological data, it is often required to assign measurements to distinct categories (e.g. 'high' and 'low' and possibly 'intermediate'). Subsequent analyses strongly depend on the results of this quantization. Poor quantization will have potentially misleading effects on further investigations. We propose the BiTrinA package that integrates different multiscale algorithms for binarization and for trinarization of one-dimensional data with methods for quality assessment and visualization of the results. By identifying measurements that show large variations over different time points or conditions, this quality assessment can determine candidates that are related to the specific experimental setting. BiTrinA is freely available on CRAN. hans.kestler@leibniz-fli.de or hans.kestler@uni-ulm.de Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.