4.3. AgeCollapsed Pre-Processing and Creation

After pre-processing and quality control, 1807 samples aged between 15 and 96 years remained, most of them concentrated among young people and adults (Figure 4.4). These samples were used to build the ageCollapsed dataset (as described in Section 3.4 of the Methodology). ageCollapsed consists of a combination of all studies in a new dataset, representing the expression value of the transcripts for each age. Thus, we obtain an expression matrix where the transcripts common to all platforms (8348) are represented by the lines and the ages by the columns, with a total of 82 columns, each one representing an age between 15 and 96 years (with except age 95).

Figura 4.4. Representação da Distribuição e Representatividade das Idades. (A) Histograma das idades de todas as amostras. (B) Gráfico ilustrando a representatividade de cada idade pelas amostras encontradas em todos os estudos.