PT - JOURNAL ARTICLE AU - David M. Rocke AU - Luyao Ruan AU - J. Jared Gossett AU - Blythe Durbin-Johnson AU - Sharon Aviran TI - Controlling False Positive Rates in Methods for Differential Gene Expression Analysis using RNA-Seq Data AID - 10.1101/018739 DP - 2015 Jan 01 TA - bioRxiv PG - 018739 4099 - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2015/04/29/018739.short 4100 - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2015/04/29/018739.full AB - We review existing methods for the analysis of RNA-Seq data and place them in a common framework of a sequence of tasks that are usually part of the process. We show that many existing methods produce large numbers of false positives in cases where the null hypothesis is true by construction and where actual data from RNA-Seq studies are used, as opposed to simulations that make specific assumptions about the nature of the data. We show that some of those mathematical assumptions about the data likely are one of the causes of the false positives, and define a general structure that is not apparently subject to these problems. The best performance was shown by limma-voom and by some simple methods composed of easily understandable steps.