Analysis of gene expression data with pathway scores

Abstract

We present a new approach for the evaluation of gene expression data. The basic idea is to generate biologically possible pathways and to score them with respect to gene expression measurements. We suggest sample scoring functions for different problem specifications. We assess the significance of the scores for the investigated pathways by comparison to a number of scores for random pathways. We show that simple scoring functions can assign statistically significant scores to biologically relevant pathways. This suggests that the combination of appropriate scoring functions with the systematic generation of pathways can be used in order to select the most interesting pathways based on gene expression measurements.