High-throughput chromosome conformation capture (Hi-C) has become the state-of-the-art technology for studying genome-wide chromatin structures. Despite rapid technological advance, Hi-C data still is highly noisy. Assessing reproducibility of Hi-C data across replicates is an important way to monitor data quality. However, existing statistical measures for reproducibility are not entirely suitable for Hi-C data due to its spatial structure, and can generate misleading results.
In this work, we develop a new method for assessing the reproducibility of Hi-C data. By takes account of the spatial effect in Hi-C data, this method effectively distinguishes experiments with different reproducibility. We illustrate our method using both simulations and real data analyses.
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