Discovering statistically significant pathways in expression profiling studies.

ABSTRACT: Accurate and rapid identification of perturbed pathways through the analysis of genome-wide expression profiles facilitates the generation of biological hypotheses. We propose a statistical framework for determining whether a specified group of genes for a pathway has a coordinated association with a phenotype of interest. Several issues on proper hypothesis-testing procedures are clarified. In particular, it is shown that the differences in the correlation structure of each set of genes can lead to a biased comparison among gene sets unless a normalization procedure is applied. We propose statistical tests for two important but different aspects of association for each group of genes. This approach has more statistical power than currently available methods and can result in the discovery

SUBMITTER: Tian L 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC1200092 | biostudies-literature | 2005 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature