Threshold extraction in metabolite concentration data

The further development of analytical techniques based on gas chromatography and mass spectrometry now facilitate the generation of larger sets of metabolite concentration data. These are a prime source for the study of metabolic behaviour under different environmental conditions. In order to study the impact of environmental stimuli on organisms it is helpful to know about discrete states the concentrations adopt. A straightforward method to recognize such states is the identification of modes in the individual distributions of concentration variables. However, this approach does not fit well noisy, sparse or ambiguous data. General techniques for finding discretisation thresholds in continuous data also prove to be practically insufficient to detect states due to the weak conditional dependencies in the data. We address this problem by identifying significant thresholds in single variables through a global survey considering all variables. The technique is based upon a comparis...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: GCB
• Authors: André Flöter, Jacques Nicolas, Torsten Schaub, Joachim Selbig
• Keywords: Concentration Variables, GCB 2003, Metabolite Concentration Data, Significant Thresholds