Comparison of Normalizations for cDNA Microarray Data

cDNA microarray experiments permit us to investigate the expression levels of thousands of genes simultaneously and to make it easy to compare gene expression from different populations. However, researchers are asked to be cautious in interpreting the results because of the unexpected sources of variation such as systematic errors from the microarrayer and the difference of cDNA dye intensity. And the scanner itself calculates both of mean and median of the signal and background pixels, so it follows a selection which raw data will be used in analysis. In this paper, we compare the results in each case of using mean and median from the raw data and normalization methods in reducing the systematic errors with arm's skin cells of old and young males. Using median is preferable to mean because the distribution of the test statistic (t-statistic) from the median is more close to normal distribution than that from mean. Scaled print tip normalization is better than global or lowess normalization due to the distribution of the test-statistic.