Benchmarking enrichment analysis methods with the disease pathway network

Enrichment analysis (EA) is a common approach to gain functional insights from genome-scale experiments. As a consequence, a large number of EA methods have been developed, yet it is unclear from previous studies which method is the best for a given dataset. The main issues with previous benchmarks include the complexity of correctly assigning true pathways to a test dataset, and lack of generality of the evaluation metrics, for which the rank of a single target pathway is commonly used. We here provide a generalized EA benchmark and apply it to the most widely used EA methods, representing all four categories of current approaches. The benchmark employs a new set of 82 curated gene expression datasets from DNA microarray and RNA-Seq experiments for 26 diseases, of which only 13 are cancers. In order to address the shortcomings of the single target pathway approach and to enhance the sensitivity evaluation, we present the Disease Pathway Network, in which related KEGG pathways are linked. We introduce a novel approach to evaluate pathway EA by combining sensitivity and specificity to provide a balanced evaluation of EA methods. This approach identifies Network Enrichment Analysis methods as the overall top performers compared to overlap-based methods. By using randomized gene expression datasets, we explore the null hypothesis bias of each method, revealing that most of them produce skewed p-values.