Denoising of array-based DNA copy number data using the dual-tree complex wavelet transform

Array-based comparative genomic hybridization (array CGH) is a highly efficient technique, allowing the simultaneous measurement of genomic DNA copy number at hundreds or thousands of loci and the reliable detection of local one-copy-level variations. Characterization of these DNA copy number changes is important for both the basic understanding of cancer and its diagnosis. In order to develop effective methods to identify aberration regions from array CGH data, many recent research works focus on both smoothing-based and segmentation-based data processing. In this paper, we propose to use the dual-tree complex wavelet transform to smooth the array CGH data. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach through theoretic and experimental exploration of a set of array CGH data, including both synthetic data and real data. The comparison results show that our method outperforms the previous approaches.