Bayesian Pathway Enrichment Analysis

Bayesian pathway enrichment analysis tests whether a predefined set of genes — a biological pathway — is systematically overrepresented among genes that show evidence of differential activity in an experiment. Unlike classical over-representation tests, it encodes prior biological knowledge as a prior distribution and updates it with the observed expression data, yielding posterior probabilities of enrichment rather than p-values. This probabilistic framing naturally handles small samples, multiple pathways, and uncertainty propagation in a coherent statistical framework.