massiR

massiR is an R package to address the challenge of missing sample sex information in publicly available gene expression microarray datasets. Given the crucial role of transcriptome-wide expression analyses in current research and the significant volume of data obtained from microarray experiments stored in public repositories, the absence of sample sex metadata can severely limit the potential for data reuse, particularly in new analyses or meta-analyses considering sex effects.

To overcome this limitation, 'massiR' leverages microarray probes targeting Y chromosome genes to predict the sex of samples within these datasets. It employs unsupervised clustering methods to efficiently classify samples into male and female groups, thus enabling researchers to identify the sex of samples in mammalian microarray datasets for the first time or confirm previously known sex information.