MOTIVATION: The Illumina BeadArray is a popular platform for profiling DNA methylation, an important epigenetic event associated with gene silencing and chromosomal instability. However, current approaches rely on an arbitrary detection P-value cutoff for excluding probes and samples from subsequent analysis as a quality control step, which results in missing observations and information loss. It is desirable to have an approach that incorporates the whole data, but accounts for the different quality of individual observations. RESULTS: We first investigate and propose a statistical framework for removing the source of biases in Illumina Methylation BeadArray based on several positive control samples. We then introduce a weighted model-based clustering called LumiWCluster for Illumina BeadArray that weights each observation according to the detection P-values systematically and avoids discarding subsets of the data. LumiWCluster allows for discovery of distinct methylation patterns and automatic selection of informative CpG loci. We demonstrate the advantages of LumiWCluster on two publicly available Illumina GoldenGate Methylation datasets (ovarian cancer and hepatocellular carcinoma). AVAILABILITY: R package LumiWCluster can be downloaded from http://www.unc.edu/∼pfkuan/LumiWCluster.

MOTIVATION: The nearest shrunken centroid (NSC) method has been successfully applied in many DNA-microarray classification problems. The NSC uses 'shrunken' centroids as prototypes for each class and identifies subsets of genes that best characterize each class. Classification is then made to the nearest (shrunken) centroid. The NSC is very easy to implement and very easy to interpret, however, it has drawbacks. RESULTS: We show that the NSC method can be interpreted in the framework of LASSO regression. Based on that, we consider two new methods, adaptive L(infinity)-norm penalized NSC (ALP-NSC) and adaptive hierarchically penalized NSC (AHP-NSC), with two different penalty functions for microarray classification, which improve over the NSC. Unlike the L(1)-norm penalty used in LASSO, the penalty terms that we consider make use of the fact that parameters belonging to one gene should be treated as a natural group. Numerical results indicate that the two new methods tend to remove irrelevant genes more effectively and provide better classification results than the L(1)-norm approach. AVAILABILITY: R code for the ALP-NSC and the AHP-NSC algorithms are available from authors upon request.