DysPIA: A Novel Dysregulated Pathway Identification Analysis Method

Differential co-expression-based pathway analysis is still limited and not widely used. In most current methods, the pathways were considered as gene sets, but the gene regulation relationships were not considered, and the computational speed was slow. In this article, we proposed a novel Dysregulated Pathway Identification Analysis (DysPIA) method to overcome these shortcomings. We adopted the idea of Correlation by Individual Level Product into analysis and performed a fast enrichment analysis. We constructed a combined gene-pair background which was much more sufficient than the background used in Edge Set Enrichment Analysis. In simulation study, DysPIA was able to identify the causal pathways with high AUC (0.9584 to 0.9896). In p53 mutation data, DysPIA obtained better performance than other methods. It obtained more potential dysregulated pathways that could be literature verified, and it ran much faster (similar to 1,700-8,000 times faster than other methods when 10,000 permutations). DysPIA was also applied to breast cancer relapse dataset and breast cancer subtype dataset. The results show that DysPIA is effective and has a great biological significance. R packages DysPIA and DysPIAData are constructed and freely available on R CRAN (https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/DysPIA/index.html and https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/DysPIAData/index.html), and on GitHub (https://github.com/lemonwang2020).

Automated summary

Dysregulated Pathway Identification Analysis (DysPIA) addresses limitations of current pathway analysis methods by incorporating individual level product correlation and constructing a more comprehensive gene-pair background. It demonstrates high accuracy in identifying causal pathways in simulation studies and outperforms other methods in analyzing p53 mutation data. DysPIA's practical applications in breast cancer datasets further highlight its effectiveness and biological significance.