PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Loes Olde Loohuis
AU  - Andreas Witzel
AU  - Bud Mishra
TI  - Power-law Null Model for Bystander Mutations in Cancer
AID  - 10.1101/001651
DP  - 2014 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 001651
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2014/01/02/001651.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2014/01/02/001651.full
AB  - In this paper we study Copy Number Variation (CNV) data. The underlying process generating CNV segments is generally assumed to be memory-less, giving rise to an exponential distribution of segment lengths. In this paper, we provide evidence from cancer patient data, which suggests that this generative model is too simplistic, and that segment lengths follow a power-law distribution instead. We conjecture a simple preferential attachment generative model that provides the basis for the observed power-law distribution. We then show how an existing statistical method for detecting cancer driver genes can be improved by incorporating the power-law distribution in the null model.