Skip to main content

Advertisement

Log in

PathActMarker: an R package for inferring pathway activity of complex diseases

  • Letter
  • Published:
Frontiers of Computer Science Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Conclusion

We developed PathActMarker, an R package for inferring pathway activity of complex diseases. The package integrates widely used normalization methods for gene expression data and provides pathway data from six sources. Meanwhile, eight state-of-the-art tools can be used to convert the high-dimensional gene expression data into a biologically interpretable low-dimensional pathway activity matrix, and extensive evaluations are also included to measure the performance of these tools. The package also contains functions to identify important pathways as biomarkers based on statistical and machine learning algorithms, and provides a set of functions for interpretation and analysis.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Subscribe and save

Springer+ Basic
$34.99 /Month
  • Get 10 units per month
  • Download Article/Chapter or eBook
  • 1 Unit = 1 Article or 1 Chapter
  • Cancel anytime
Subscribe now

Buy Now

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

References

  1. Drier Y, Sheffer M, Domany E. Pathway-based personalized analysis of cancer. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2013, 110(16): 6388–6393

    Article  Google Scholar 

  2. Liberzon A, Subramanian A, Pinchback R, Thorvaldsdóttir H, Tamayo P, Mesirov J P. Molecular signatures database (MSigDB) 3.0. Bioinformatics, 2011, 27(12): 1739–1740

    Article  Google Scholar 

  3. Kanehisa M, Goto S. Kegg: kyoto encyclopedia of genes and genomes. Nucleic Acids Research, 2000, 28(1): 27–30

    Article  Google Scholar 

  4. Li X, Li M, Xiang J, Zhao Z, Shang X. SEPA: signaling entropy-based algorithm to evaluate personalized pathway activation for survival analysis on pan-cancer data. Bioinformatics, 2022, 38(9): 2536–2543

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Hänzelmann S, Castelo R, Guinney J. GSVA: gene set variation analysis for microarray and RNA-Seq data. BMC Bioinformatics, 2013, 14: 7

    Article  Google Scholar 

  6. Barbie D A, Tamayo P, Boehm J S, Kim S Y, Moody S E, et al. Systematic RNA interference reveals that oncogenic KRAS-driven cancers require TBK1. Nature, 2009, 462(7269): 108–112

    Article  Google Scholar 

  7. Lee E, Chuang H Y, Kim J W, Ideker T, Lee D. Inferring pathway activity toward precise disease classification. PLoS Computational Biology, 2008, 4(11): e1000217

    Article  Google Scholar 

  8. Tomfohr J, Lu J, Kepler T B. Pathway level analysis of gene expression using singular value decomposition. BMC Bioinformatics, 2005, 6: 225

    Article  Google Scholar 

  9. Mao W, Zaslavsky E, Hartmann B M, Sealfon S C, Chikina M. Pathway-level information extractor (PLIER) for gene expression data. Nature Methods, 2019, 16(7): 607–610

    Article  Google Scholar 

  10. Su K, Yu Q, Shen R, Sun S Y, Moreno C S, Li X, Qin Z S. Pan-cancer analysis of pathway-based gene expression pattern at the individual level reveals biomarkers of clinical prognosis. Cell Reports Methods, 2021, 1(4): 100050

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 62202383), Guangdong Basic and Applied Basic Research Foundation (No. 2024A1515012602), and the National Key Research and Development Program of China (No. 2022YFD1801200).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Xingyu Liao, Min Li or Xuequn Shang.

Ethics declarations

Competing interests The authors declare that they have no competing interests of financial conflicts to disclose.

Electronic supplementary material

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Li, X., Hao, J., Zhao, Z. et al. PathActMarker: an R package for inferring pathway activity of complex diseases. Front. Comput. Sci. 19, 193908 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11704-024-40420-y

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11704-024-40420-y