Probabilistic prioritization of candidate pathway association with pathway score.

The proposed summary pathway score provides for each sample an overall evaluation of gene expression in a gene-set. It demonstrates the advantages of including all genes in the set and the synchronization of correlation direction. The simultaneous utilization of all pathway-level scores in a Bayesian model not only offers a probabilistic evaluation and ranking of the pathway association but also presents good accuracy in identifying the top-ranking pathways. The resulting recommendation list of ranked pathways can be a reference for potential target therapy or for future allocation of research resources.