Summary of Gene Set Enrichment Analysis (GSEA)

GSEA goal

The below description is cited from Subramanian et al. (2005):

• The goal of GSEA is to determine whether members of a gene set S tend to occur toward the top (or bottom) of the ranked gene list L, in which case the gene set is correlated with the phenotypic class distinction.
• Given an a priori defined set of genes S (e.g., genes encoding products in a metabolic pathway, located in the same cytogenetic band, or sharing the same GO category), the goal of GSEA is to determine whether the members of S are randomly distributed throughout L or primarily found at the top or bottom. We expect that sets related to the phenotypic distinction will tend to show the latter distribution.