TY - JOUR T1 - Power-law Null Model for Bystander Mutations in Cancer JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/001651 SP - 001651 AU - Loes Olde Loohuis AU - Andreas Witzel AU - Bud Mishra Y1 - 2014/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2014/01/02/001651.abstract N2 - 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. ER -