Identifying sets of related genes (gene-sets) empirically associated with treatment or phenotype yields valuable interpretative insights on involved biological processes. Complex forms of gene-set associations remain difficult to identify. Through this publically available package, we provide the gene-set distance analysis (GSDA) by generalizing distance correlations to evaluate the association of a gene set with categorical and censored event-time variables. A recursive backward elimination procedure to identify a subset of genes that most strongly associates with the variable of interest.
devtools::install_github('xueyuancao/GSDA')