Genetics and Genomics Commons^™

Improving Gsea For Analysis Of Biologic Pathways For Differential Gene Expression Across A Binary Phenotype , Irina Dinu, John D. Potter, Thomas Mueller, Qi Liu, Adeniyi J. Adewale, Gian S. Jhangri, Gunilla Einecke, Konrad S. Famulski, Philip Halloran, Yutaka Yasui

COBRA Preprint Series

Gene-set analysis evaluates the expression of biological pathways, or a priori defined gene sets, rather than that of single genes, in association with a binary phenotype, and is of great biologic interest in many DNA microarray studies. Gene Set Enrichment Analysis (GSEA) has been applied widely as a tool for gene-set analyses. We describe here some critical problems with GSEA and propose an alternative method by extending the single-gene analysis method, Significance Analysis of Microarray (SAM), to gene-set analyses (SAM-GS). Specifically, we illustrate, in a simulation study, that GSEA gives statistical significance to gene sets that have no gene associated …