Does module size decrease as the number of samples increase in WGCNA? We are working with a lot of samples, more than 50,000 people! We are using WGCNA to get modules and it seems like there are less number of module genes the more people we use. We are following the tutorial guidelines. We set the min modulesize = 30 and deepSplit = 4 (max sensitivity) However, we are getting very small modules with numbers almost 30 for all. We want to know if using this many samples creates an artifact and the variation between the samples may reduce the correlation seen between the genes? If that is the case, do you suggest any way we can fix that? Also do you think z-scaling expression data improves the module detection?
Thank you so much.
The biggest difference a large number of samples makes is that you can usually decrease the soft thresholding power. If you use power 6 (or 12 for a signed network), try decreasing it to 3 or even 2 (6 or 4 for signed network). Apart from that, it could also be that the co-expression modules in your data are simply smaller than what people usually find, nothing apriori wrong with that.