  A variety of genome-wide profiling techniques are available to probe
complementary aspects of genome structure and function. Integrative analysis of
heterogeneous data sources can reveal higher-level interactions that cannot be
detected based on individual observations. A standard integration task in
cancer studies is to identify altered genomic regions that induce changes in
the expression of the associated genes based on joint analysis of genome-wide
gene expression and copy number profiling measurements. In this review, we
provide a comparison among various modeling procedures for integrating
genome-wide profiling data of gene copy number and transcriptional alterations
and highlight common approaches to genomic data integration. A transparent
benchmarking procedure is introduced to quantitatively compare the cancer gene
prioritization performance of the alternative methods. The benchmarking
algorithms and data sets are available at http://intcomp.r-forge.r-project.org
