Integrated genomic analysis of biological gene sets with applications in lung cancer prognosis

Background: Burgeoning interest in integrative analyses has produced a rise in studies which incorporate data from multiple genomic platforms. Literature for conducting formal hypothesis testing on an integrative gene set level is considerably sparse. This paper is biologically motivated by our interest in the joint effects of epigenetic methylation loci and their associated mRNA gene expressions on lung cancer survival status. Results: We provide an efficient screening approach across multiplatform genomic data on the level of biologically related sets of genes, and our methods are applicable to various disease models regardless whether the underlying true model is known (iTEGS) or unknown (iNOTE). Our proposed testing procedure dominated two competing methods. Using our methods, we identified a total of 28 gene sets with significant joint epigenomic and transcriptomic effects on one-year lung cancer survival. Conclusions: We propose efficient variance component-based testing procedures to facilitate the joint testing of multiplatform genomic data across an entire gene set. The testing procedure for the gene set is self-contained, and can easily be extended to include more or different genetic platforms. iTEGS and iNOTE implemented in R are freely available through the inote package at https://cran.r-project.org//.