Fast parametric time warping of peak lists

Summary: Alignment of peaks across samples is a difficult but unavoidable step in the data analysis for all analytical techniques containing a separation step like chromatography. Important application examples are the fields of metabolomics and proteomics. Parametric time warping (PTW) has already shown to be very useful in these fields because of the highly restricted form of the warping functions, avoiding overfitting. Here, we describe a new formulation of PTW, working on peak-picked features rather than on complete profiles. Not only does this allow for a much more smooth integration in existing pipelines, it also speeds up the (already among the fastest) algorithm by orders of magnitude. Using two publicly available data sets we show the potential of the new approach. The first set is a LC-DAD data set of grape samples, and the second an LC-MS data set of apple extracts. Availability and implementation: Parametric time warping of peak lists is implemented in the ptw package, version 1.9.1 and onwards, available from Githu