OMEN: network-based driver gene identification using mutual exclusivity.

Network-based driver identification methods that can exploit mutual exclusivity typically fail to detect rare drivers because of their statistical rigor. Propagation-based methods in contrast allow recovering rare driver genes, but the interplay between network topology and high-scoring nodes often results in spurious predictions. The specificity of driver gene detection can be improved by taking into account both gene-specific and gene-set properties. Combining these requires a formalism that can adjust gene-set properties depending on the exact network context within which a gene is analyzed. We developed OMEN: a logic programming framework based on random walk semantics. OMEN presents a number of novel concepts. In particular, its design is unique in that it presents an effective approach to combine both gene-specific driver properties and gene-set properties, and includes a novel method to avoid restrictive, a priori filtering of genes by exploiting the gene-set property of mutual exclusivity, expressed in terms of the functional impact scores of mutations, rather than in terms of simple binary mutation calls. Applying OMEN to a benchmark dataset derived from TCGA illustrates how OMEN is able to robustly identify driver genes and modules of driver genes as proxies of driver pathways. The source code is freely available for download at www.github.com/DriesVanDaele/OMEN. The dataset is archived at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6419097 and the code at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6419764. Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

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