MutPrior:An Ensemble Method for Ranking Genes in Cancer

Root cause analysis of cancer as well of design of personalized treatment depends on the ability to prioritize mutated genes in cancer. In this paper, we propose a novel approach 'MutPrior' to prioritize genes in a given caner. We hypothesize that a gene is important for cancer if it has high functional impact mutations, is strategically important for network stability and has high relevance to the disease. This approach integrates functional impact scores, centrality in gene-gene interaction network and disease relevance scores to prioritize the mutated genes. MutPrior outputs a prioritization of genes which is more actionable than any current approaches. In the process, we do away with the arbitrary cutoffs as well as confusion caused by notions of driver-passenger.