RADIS

METa-analysis of RAnked DISCovery datasets (METRADISC) is a meta-analysis method developed for combining information across discovery-oriented datasets and for testing between-study heterogeneity for each biological variable of interest. The method is based on non-parametric Monte Carlo permutation testing and is used to combine diverse datasets that present a challenge due to the multidimensional biological signals. METRADISC tests for each biological variable of interest its average rank and the between-study heterogeneity of the study-specific ranks. The procedure is repeated to generate null distributions for the metrics. The use of METRADISC is demonstrated empirically using gene expression data from seven studies comparing prostate cancer cases and normal controls.