Quantile normalization

Article summary

In statistics, quantile normalization is a technique for making two distributions identical in statistical properties. To quantile-normalize a test distribution to a reference distribution of the same length, sort the test distribution and sort the reference distribution. The highest entry in the test distribution then takes the value of the highest entry in the reference distribution, the next highest entry in the reference distribution, and so on, until the test distribution is a perturbation of the reference distribution. To quantile normalize two or more distributions to each other, without a reference distribution, sort as before, then set to the average (usually, arithmetic mean) of the distributions. So the highest value in all cases becomes the mean of the highest values, the second highest value becomes the mean of the second highest values, and so on. Generally a reference distribution will be one of the standard statistical distributions such as the Gaussian distribution or the Poisson distribution. The reference distribution can be generated randomly or from taking regular samples from the cumulative distribution function of the distribution. However, any reference distribution can be used. Quantile normalization is frequently used in microarray data analysis. It was introduced as quantile standardization and then renamed as quantile normalization.

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