Exploring Disease Similarity in Terms of Dysfunctional
Regulatory Mechanisms
Description
Elucidation of human disease similarities has emerged as an active research area, which is highly relevant to etiology, disease classification, and drug repositioning. This package was designed and implemented for identifying disease similarities. It contains five functions which are 'DCEA', 'DCpathway', 'DS', 'comDCGL' and 'comDCGLplot'. In 'DCEA' function, differentially co-expressed genes and differentially co-expressed links are extracted from disease vs. health samples. Then 'DCpathway' function assigns differential co-expression values of pathways to be the average differential co-expression value of their component genes. Then 'DS' employs partial correlation coefficient of pathways as the disease similarity for each disease pairs. And 'DS' contains a permutation process for evaluating the statistical significant of observed disease partial correlation coefficients. At last, 'comDCGL' and 'comDCGLplot' sort out shared differentially co-expressed genes and differentially co-expressed links with regulation information and visualize them.