Bayesian assignment of gene ontology terms to gene expression experiments

Abstract

Motivation: Gene expression assays allow for genome scale analyses of molecular biological mechanisms. State-of-the-art data analysis provides lists of involved genes, either by calculating significance levels of mRNA abundance or by Bayesian assessments of gene activity. A common problem of such approaches is the difficulty of interpreting the biological implication of the resulting gene lists. This lead to an increased interest in methods for inferring highlevel biological information. A common approach for representing high level information is by inferring gene ontology (GO) terms which may be attributed to the expression data experiment. Results: This article proposes a probabilistic model for GO term inference. Modelling assumes that gene annotations to GO terms are available and gene involvement in an experiment is represented by a posterior probabilities over gene-specific indicator variables. Such probability measures result from many Bayesian approaches for expression data analysis. The proposed model combines these indicator probabilities in a probabilistic fashion and provides a probabilistic GO term assignment as a result. Experiments on synthetic and microarray data suggest that advantages of the proposed probabilistic GO term inference over statistical test-based approaches are in particular evident for sparsely annotated GO terms and in situations of large uncertainty about gene activity. Provided that appropriate annotations exist, the proposed approach is easily applied to inferring other high level assignments like pathways. © The Author(s) 2012. Published by Oxford University Press.