iBBiG

iBBiG is a software tool designed for meta-analysis of genomics data to identify genes associated with a biological phenotype across multiple datasets. The tool transforms gene expression profiles into binary gene set profiles by discretizing the results of gene set enrichment analyses and applies a new iterative bi-clustering algorithm to identify groups of gene sets that are coordinately associated with groups of phenotypes across multiple studies. iBBiG is optimized for meta-analysis of large numbers of diverse genomics data and does not require prior knowledge of the number or size of clusters. When applied to simulated data and breast cancer studies, iBBiG outperforms commonly used clustering methods and identifies novel gene set-phenotype associations that predict tumor metastases within tumor subtypes. iBBiG is implemented in the Bioconductor package and is available for use.