Universal Count Correction for High-Throughput Sequencing

Abstract

We show that existing RNA-seq, DNase-seq, and ChIP-seq data exhibit overdispersed per-base read count distributions that are not matched to existing computational method assumptions. To compensate for this overdispersion we introduce a nonparametric and universal method for processing per-base sequencing read count data called Fixseq. We demonstrate that Fixseq substantially improves the performance of existing RNA-seq, DNase-seq, and ChIP-seq analysis tools when compared with existing alternatives.