A new statistical method for curve group analysis of longitudinal gene expression data illustrated for breast cancer in the NOWAC postgenome cohort as a proof of principle

Background The understanding of changes in temporal processes related to human carcinogenesis is limited. One approach for prospective functional genomic studies is to compile trajectories of differential expression of genes, based on measurements from many case-control pairs. We propose a new statistical method that does not assume any parametric shape for the gene trajectories.