Cross-platform microarray data integration using the normalised linear transform.

Small sample size is one of the biggest challenges in microarray data analysis. With microarray data being dramatically accumulated, integrating data from related studies represents a natural way to increase sample size so that more reliable statistical analysis may be performed. In this paper, we present a simple and effective integration scheme, called Normalised Linear Transform (NLT), to combine data from different microarray platforms. The NLT scheme is compared with three other integration schemes for two tasks: classification analysis and gene marker selection. Our experiments demonstrate that the NLT scheme performs best in terms of classification accuracy, and leads to more biologically significant marker genes.