  Motivation: Although principal component analysis (PCA) is widely used for
the dimensional reduction of biomedical data, interpretation of PCA results
remains daunting. Most existing methods attempt to explain each principal
component (PC) in terms of a small number of variables by generating
approximate PCs with few non-zero loadings. Although useful when just a few
variables dominate the population PCs, these methods are often inadequate for
characterizing the PCs of high-dimensional genomic data. For genomic data,
reproducible and biologically meaningful PC interpretation requires methods
based on the combined signal of functionally related sets of genes. While gene
set testing methods have been widely used in supervised settings to quantify
the association of groups of genes with clinical outcomes, these methods have
seen only limited application for testing the enrichment of gene sets relative
to sample PCs. Results: We describe a novel approach, principal component gene
set enrichment (PCGSE), for computing the statistical association between gene
sets and the PCs of genomic data. The PCGSE method performs a two-stage
competitive gene set test using the correlation between each gene and each PC
as the gene-level test statistic with flexible choice of both the gene set test
statistic and the method used to compute the null distribution of the gene set
statistic. Using simulated data with simulated gene sets and real gene
expression data with curated gene sets, we demonstrate that biologically
meaningful and computationally efficient results can be obtained from a simple
parametric version of the PCGSE method that performs a correlation-adjusted
two-sample t-test between the gene-level test statistics for gene set members
and genes not in the set. Availability:
http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/PCGSE/index.html Contact:
<EMAIL_ADDRESS>or<EMAIL_ADDRESS>