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Background: Gene pathway can be defined as a group of genes that interact with each other to perform some biological processes. Along with the efforts to identify the individual genes that play vital roles in a particular disease, there is a growing interest in identifying the roles of gene pathways in such diseases. Results: This paper proposes an innovative fuzzy-set-theory-based approach, Multi-dimensional Cluster Misclassification test (MCM-test), to measure the significance of gene pathways in a particular disease. Experiments have been conducted on both synthetic data and real world data. Results on published diabetes gene expression dataset and a list of predefined pathways from KEGG identified OXPHOS pathway involved in oxidative phosphorylation in mitochondria and other mitochondrial related pathways to be deregulated in diabetes patients. Our results support the previously supported notion that mitochondrial dysfunction is an important event in insulin resistance and type-2 diabetes. Conclusion: Our experiments results suggest that MCM-test can be successfully used in pathway level differential analysis of gene expression datasets. This approach also provides a new solution to the general problem of measuring the difference between two groups of data, which is one of the most essential problems in most areas of research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Microarray techniques have revolutionized genomic research by making it possible to monitor the expression of thousands of genes in parallel. As the amount of microarray data being produced is increasing at an exponential rate, there is a great demand for efficient and effective expression data analysis tools. Comparison of gene expression profiles of patients against those of normal counterpart people will enhance our understanding of a disease and identify leads for therapeutic intervention. Results: In this paper, we propose an innovative approach, fuzzy membership test (FM-test), based on fuzzy set theory to identify disease associated genes from microarray gene expression profiles. A new concept of FM d-value is defined to quantify the divergence of two sets of values. We further analyze the asymptotic property of FM-test, and then establish the relationship between FM d-value and p-value. We applied FM-test to a diabetes expression dataset and a lung cancer expression dataset, respectively. Within the 10 significant genes identified in diabetes dataset, six of them have been confirmed to be associated with diabetes in the literature and one has been suggested by other researchers. Within the 10 significantly overexpressed genes identified in lung cancer data, most (eight) of them have been confirmed by the literatures which are related to the lung cancer. Conclusion: Our experiments on synthetic datasets show that FM-test is effective and robust. The results in diabetes and lung cancer datasets validated the effectiveness of FM-test. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]