# gsEasy

## Calculate p-values for enrichment of set

gsEasy has a function gset for calculating p-values of enrichment for sets (of genes) in ranked/scored lists (of genes) by permutation (see 'Gene Set Enrichment Analysis' described by Subramanian et al, 2005). The arguments of gset are named as in the paper:

• N: the total number of genes,
• S: integer vector giving the ranks of the genes in the test set amongst the N, or giving the indices within the scores vector r (see below) or a character vector of the names of genes in the test set,
• r: (optional) vector of length N of correlation scores, e.g. gene expression correlation. If unspecified, it defaults to 1-(i-1)/N for the ith gene. If S is given as the names of genes, r must either be a character vector of genes in rank order or named by genes (necessarily containing all the genes in S).
• p: a numeric value used to exponentiate the enrichment scores given by r, with higher values having the effect of increasing the weight on the highest scores/ranks (for more details, see Subramanian et al, 2005). The default value is 1 [i.e. not transformed].

Say we had a set of 5 genes which appeared at the top five ranks out of 1000 (i.e. highly enriched at the high ranks!). We could then calculate an enrichment p-value using the command:

gset(S=1:5, N=1000)
## [1] 9.9999e-06

So the p-value is close to zero. However for random sets, the p-values are distributed uniformly:

replicate(n=10, expr=gset(S=sample.int(n=1000, size=5), N=1000))
##  [1] 0.7213930 0.1111111 0.1058394 0.5870647 0.1142857 0.9850746 0.9701493
##  [8] 0.1840796 0.5074627 0.8905473

Alternatively, you can pass the names of genes as S with a sorted list of gene names as r (in which case the scores default to the ranks in the list), or a numeric vector of scores named by genes as r.

gset(S=c("gene 1", "gene 5", "gene 40"), r=paste("gene", 1:100))
## [1] 0.07792208

Multiple gene sets can thus be tested for enrichment with a single call to a high level function such as sapply (or, if you have many sets to test and multiple cores available, mclapply), for instance:

gene_sets <- c(list(1:5), replicate(n=10, simplify=FALSE, expr=sample.int(n=1000, size=5)))
names(gene_sets) <- c("enriched set", paste("unenriched set", 1:10))
gene_sets
## $enriched set ## [1] 1 2 3 4 5 ## ##$unenriched set 1
## [1]   6  53 974 143 936
##
## $unenriched set 2 ## [1] 438 237 252 458 293 ## ##$unenriched set 3
## [1] 624 680 778 230 727
##
## $unenriched set 4 ## [1] 997 254 714 307 513 ## ##$unenriched set 5
## [1] 104 786 263 857 632
##
## $unenriched set 6 ## [1] 149 970 961 73 265 ## ##$unenriched set 7
## [1] 435 138 982 387 722
##
## $unenriched set 8 ## [1] 667 441 506 186 913 ## ##$unenriched set 9
## [1] 791 911 638 468 274
##
## $unenriched set 10 ## [1] 758 626 817 698 45 sapply(gene_sets, function(set) gset(S=set, N=1000)) ## enriched set unenriched set 1 unenriched set 2 unenriched set 3 ## 0.0000099999 0.0017199828 0.2388059701 0.9353233831 ## unenriched set 4 unenriched set 5 unenriched set 6 unenriched set 7 ## 0.7562189055 0.5024875622 0.0247097529 0.4228855721 ## unenriched set 8 unenriched set 9 unenriched set 10 ## 0.7462686567 0.9054726368 0.5124378109 ## Ontological annotations gsEasy has a function get_ontological_gene_sets for creating lists of gene sets corresponding to annotation with ontological terms such that ontological is-a relations are propagated. get_ontological_gene_sets accepts an ontological_index (see the R package ontologyIndex for more details) argument and two character vectors, corresponding to genes and terms respectively, whereby the n-th element in each vector corresponds to one annotation pair. The result, a list of character vectors of gene names, can then be used as an argument of gset. library(ontologyIndex) data(hpo) df <- data.frame( gene=c("gene 1", "gene 2"), term=c("HP:0000598", "HP:0000118"), name=hpo$name[c("HP:0000598", "HP:0000118")],
stringsAsFactors=FALSE,
row.names=NULL)
df
##     gene       term                   name
## 1 gene 1 HP:0000598 Abnormality of the ear
## 2 gene 2 HP:0000118 Phenotypic abnormality
get_ontological_gene_sets(hpo, gene=df$gene, term=df$term)
## $HP:0000001 ## [1] "gene 1" "gene 2" ## ##$HP:0000118
## [1] "gene 1" "gene 2"
##
## $HP:0000598 ## [1] "gene 1" ## Gene Ontology (GO) annotations gsEasy comes with a list of GO annotations, GO_gene_sets [based on annotations downloaded from geneontology.org on 07/08/2016], which can be loaded with data. This comprises a list of all gene sets (i.e. character vectors of gene names) associated with each GO term, for GO terms being annotated with at most 500 genes. data(GO_gene_sets) GO_gene_sets[1:6] ##$GO:0000002
##  [1] "AKT3"     "LONP1"    "MEF2A"    "MGME1"    "MPV17"    "MRPL17"
##  [7] "MRPL39"   "OPA1"     "PIF1"     "SLC25A33" "SLC25A36" "SLC25A4"
## [13] "TYMP"
##
## $GO:0000003 ## [1] "EIF4H" "IL12B" "LEP" "LEPR" "MMP23A" "RHOXF1" "SEPP1" "STAT3" ## [9] "TNP1" "VGF" "WDR43" ## ##$GO:0000009
## [1] "ALG12"
##
## $GO:0000010 ## [1] "PDSS1" "PDSS2" ## ##$GO:0000011
## [1] "RBSN"
##
## \$GO:0000012
##  [1] "APLF"   "APTX"   "E9PQ18" "LIG4"   "M0R2N6" "Q6ZNB5" "SIRT1"  "TDP1"
##  [9] "TNP1"   "XRCC1"

It also has a function get_GO_gene_sets which is a specialisation of get_ontological_gene_sets for the Gene Ontology (GO) which can be called passing just a file path to the annotation file (official up-to-date version available at http://geneontology.org/).