The XL-mHG test for gene set enrichment

7 The nonparametric minimum hypergeometric (mHG) test is a popular alternative to Kolmogorov-Smirnov (KS)-type tests for determining gene set enrichment. However, these approaches have not been compared to each other in a quantitative manner. Here, I first perform a simulation study to show that the mHG test is significantly more powerful than the one-sided KS test for detecting gene set enrichment. I then illustrate a shortcoming of the mHG test, which has motivated a semiparametric generalization of the test, termed the XL-mHG test. I describe an improved quadratic-time algorithm for the efficient calculation of exact XL-mHG p-values, as well as a linear-time algorithm for calculating a tighter upper bound for the p-value. Finally, I demonstrate that the XL-mHG test outperforms the one-sided KS test when applied to a reference gene expression study, and discuss general principles for analyzing gene set enrichment using the XL-mHG test. An efficient open-source Python/Cython implementation of the XL-mHG test is provided in the xlmhg package, available from PyPI and GitHub (https://github.com/flo-compbio/xlmhg) under an OSI-approved license. 8