Identification of Monotonically Differentially Expressed Genes across Pathologic Stages for Cancers

Given the fact that cancer is a multistage progression process resulting from genetic sequence mutations, the genes whose expression values increase or decrease monotonically across pathologic stages are potentially involved in tumor progression. This may provide insightful clues about how human cancers advance, thereby facilitating more personalized treatments. By replacing the expression values of genes with their GeneRanks, we propose a procedure capable of identifying monotonically differentially expressed genes (MEGs) as the disease advances. Using three real-world gene expression data that cover three distinct cancer types—colon, esophageal, and lung cancers—the proposed procedure has demonstrated excellent performance in detecting the potential MEGs. To conclude, the proposed procedure can detect MEGs across pathologic stages of cancers very efficiently and is thus highly recommended.