Comparing alternative pipelines for cross-platform microarray gene expression data integration with RNA-seq data in breast cancer

Background: According to major public repositories statistics an overwhelming majority of the existing and newly uploaded data originates from microarray experiments. Unfortunately, the potential of this data to bring new insights is limited by the effects of individual study-specific biases due to small number of biological samples. Increasing sample size by direct microarray data integration increases the statistical power to obtain a more precise estimate of gene expression in a population of individuals resulting in lower false discovery rates. However, despite numerous recommendations for gene expression data integration, there is a lack of a systematic comparison of different processing approaches aimed to asses microarray platforms diversity and ambiguous probesets to genes correspondence, leading to low number of studies applying integration.