@ARTICLE{10.3389/fbioe.2015.00129, AUTHOR={Trutschel, Diana and Schmidt, Stephan and Grosse, Ivo and Neumann, Steffen}, TITLE={Joint Analysis of Dependent Features within Compound Spectra Can Improve Detection of Differential Features}, JOURNAL={Frontiers in Bioengineering and Biotechnology}, VOLUME={3}, YEAR={2015}, URL={https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fbioe.2015.00129}, DOI={10.3389/fbioe.2015.00129}, ISSN={2296-4185}, ABSTRACT={Mass spectrometry is an important analytical technology in metabolomics. After the initial feature detection and alignment steps, the raw data processing results in a high-dimensional data matrix of mass spectral features, which is then subjected to further statistical analysis. Univariate tests like Student’s t-test and Analysis of Variances (ANOVA) are hypothesis tests, which aim to detect differences between two or more sample classes, e.g., wildtype-mutant or between different doses of treatments. In both cases, one of the underlying assumptions is the independence between metabolic features. However, in mass spectrometry, a single metabolite usually gives rise to several mass spectral features, which are observed together and show a common behavior. This paper suggests to group the related features of metabolites with CAMERA into compound spectra, and then to use a multivariate statistical method to test whether a compound spectrum (and thus the actual metabolite) is differential between two sample classes. The multivariate method is first demonstrated with an analysis between wild-type and an over-expression line of the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana. For a quantitative evaluation data sets with a simulated known effect between two sample classes were analyzed. The spectra-wise analysis showed better detection results for all simulated effects.} }