BlackSheep: A Bioconductor and Bioconda Package for Differential Extreme Value Analysis

Unbiased assays such
as shotgun proteomics and RNA-seq provide
high-resolution molecular characterization of tumors. These assays
measure molecules with highly varied distributions, making interpretation
and hypothesis testing challenging. Samples with the most extreme
measurements for a molecule can reveal the most interesting biological
insights yet are often excluded from analysis. Furthermore, rare disease
subtypes are, by definition, underrepresented in cancer cohorts. To
provide a strategy for identifying molecules aberrantly enriched in
small sample cohorts, we present BlackSheep, a package for nonparametric
description and differential analysis of genome-wide data, available
from Bioconductor (https://www.bioconductor.org/packages/release/bioc/html/blacksheepr.html) and Bioconda (https://bioconda.github.io/recipes/blksheep/README.html). BlackSheep is a complementary tool to other differential expression
analysis methods, which is particularly useful when analyzing small
subgroups in a larger cohort.