question: Which R packages have been developed for the discovery of mutational signatures in cancer?
answer: signeR: an empirical Bayesian approach to mutational signature discovery. Mutational signatures can be used to understand cancer origins and provide a unique opportunity to group tumor types that share the same origins and result from similar processes. These signatures have been identified from high throughput sequencing data generated from cancer genomes by using non-negative matrix factorisation (NMF) techniques. The extraction of mutational signatures from high-throughput data still remains a daunting task.RESULTS: Here we present a new method for the statistical estimation of mutational signatures based on an empirical Bayesian treatment of the NMF model.