Gene expression microarray technologies provide the simultaneous measurements
of a large number of genes. Typical analyses of such data focus on the
individual genes, but recent work has demonstrated that evaluating changes in
expression across predefined sets of genes often increases statistical power
and produces more robust results. We introduce a new methodology for
identifying gene sets that are differentially expressed under varying
experimental conditions. Our approach uses a hierarchical Bayesian framework
where a hyperparameter measures the significance of each gene set. Using
simulated data, we compare our proposed method to alternative approaches, such
as Gene Set Enrichment Analysis (GSEA) and Gene Set Analysis (GSA). Our
approach provides the best overall performance. We also discuss the application
of our method to experimental data based on p53 mutation status.