geneClassifiers

The iNETgrate package provides functions to build a correlation network in which nodes are genes. DNA methylation and gene expression data are integrated to define the connections between genes. This network is used to identify modules (clusters) of genes. The biological information in each of the resulting modules is represented by an eigengene. These biological signatures can be used as features e.g., for classification of patients into risk categories. The resulting biological signatures are very robust and give a holistic view of the underlying molecular changes.

This package provides several functions to explore miRNA sponge (also called ceRNA or miRNA decoy) regulation from putative miRNA-target interactions or/and transcriptomics data (including bulk, single-cell and spatial gene expression data). It provides eight popular methods for identifying miRNA sponge interactions, and an integrative method to integrate miRNA sponge interactions from different methods, as well as the functions to validate miRNA sponge interactions, and infer miRNA sponge modules, conduct enrichment analysis of miRNA sponge modules, and conduct survival analysis of miRNA sponge modules. By using a sample control variable strategy, it provides a function to infer sample-specific miRNA sponge interactions. In terms of sample-specific miRNA sponge interactions, it implements three similarity methods to construct sample-sample correlation network.

Pigengene package provides an efficient way to infer biological signatures from gene expression profiles. The signatures are independent from the underlying platform, e.g., the input can be microarray or RNA Seq data. It can even infer the signatures using data from one platform, and evaluate them on the other. Pigengene identifies the modules (clusters) of highly coexpressed genes using coexpression network analysis, summarizes the biological information of each module in an eigengene, learns a Bayesian network that models the probabilistic dependencies between modules, and builds a decision tree based on the expression of eigengenes.

Messina is a collection of algorithms for constructing optimally robust single-gene classifiers, and for identifying differential expression in the presence of outliers or unknown sample subgroups. The methods have application in identifying lead features to develop into clinical tests (both diagnostic and prognostic), and in identifying differential expression when a fraction of samples show unusual patterns of expression.

This package implements a variety of functions useful for gene set analysis using rotations to approximate the null distribution. It contributes with the implementation of seven test statistic scores that can be used with different goals and interpretations. Several functions are available to complement the statistical results with graphical representations.

SCUDO (Signature-based Clustering for Diagnostic Purposes) is a rank-based method for the analysis of gene expression profiles for diagnostic and classification purposes. It is based on the identification of sample-specific gene signatures composed of the most up- and down-regulated genes for that sample. Starting from gene expression data, functions in this package identify sample-specific gene signatures and use them to build a graph of samples. In this graph samples are joined by edges if they have a similar expression profile, according to a pre-computed similarity matrix. The similarity between the expression profiles of two samples is computed using a method similar to GSEA. The graph of samples can then be used to perform community clustering or to perform supervised classification of samples in a testing set.