oCEM: Automatic detection and analysis of overlapping co-expressed gene modules

Abstract

When it comes to the co-expressed gene module detection, its typical challenges consist of overlap between identified modules and local co-expression in a subset of biological samples. A recent study have reported that the decomposition methods are the most appropriate ones for solving these challenges. In this study, we represent a R tool, termed overlapping co-expressed gene module (overlappingCGM), which possesses those methods with a wholly automatic analysis framework to help non-technical users to easily perform complicated statistical analyses and then gain robust results. We also develop a novel auxiliary statistical approach to select the optimal number of principle components using a permutation procedure. Two example datasets are used, related to human breast cancer and mouse metabolic syndrome, to enable the illustration of the straightforward use of the tool. Computational experiment results show that overlappingCGM outperforms state-of-the-art techniques. The R scripts used in the study, including all information on the tool and its usage are made publicly available at https://github.com/huynguyen250896/overlappingCGM.