DSviaDRM: an R package for estimating disease similarity via dysfunctional regulation mechanism

Elucidation of human disease similarities has provided new insights into etiology, disease classification and drug repositioning. Since dysfunctional regulation would be manifested as the decoupling of expression correlation, disease similarity (DS) in terms of dysfunctional regulation mechanism (DRM) could be estimated by using a differential coexpression based approach, which is described in a companion paper. Due to the lack of tools for estimating DS from the viewpoint of DRM in public domain, we implemented an R package 'DSviaDRM' to identify significant DS via DRM based on transcriptomic data. DSviaDRM contains five easy-to-use functions, DCEA, DCpathway, DS, comDCGL and comDCGLplot, for identifying disease relationships and showing common differential regulation information shared by similar diseases.DSviaDRM is available as an R package, with a user's guide and source code, at http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/DSviaDRM/index.html.yyli@scbit.org or yxli@scbit.org.Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.