Linear Combination Test for Hierarchical Gene Set Analysis

Gene-set analysis (GSA) aims to identify sets of differentially expressed genes by a phenotype in DNA microarray studies. Challenges occur due to the salient characteristics of the data: (1) the number of genes is far larger than the number of observations; (2) gene expression measurements, especially within each gene set, can be highly correlated; and (3) the number of gene sets that can be examined is large and increasing rapidly. These challenges call for gene-set testing procedures that have both efficiency in computation for large GSAs and high power in the presence of the high correlation.