Enrichment set cover problem

As a common task in the fields of bioinformatics, enrichment analysis aims to investigate the functional association between a gene list of interest which often derived from biological experiments, and specific gene sets in a large database. The core problem of enrichment analysis can be characterized as a two-objective optimization problem. In this paper, we formulated the multiple gene sets enrichment problem into a variant of the set cover problem, named enrichment set cover problem, and designed four approximation algorithms to solve the NP-hard enrichment set cover problem. The performance of proposed approximation algorithms were analyzed theoretically and evaluated on the data sets from real biological databases.