aPEAR: an R package for autonomous visualization of pathway enrichment networks

SUMMARY: The interpretation of pathway enrichment analysis results is frequently complicated by an overwhelming and redundant list of significantly affected pathways. Here, we present an R package aPEAR (Advanced Pathway Enrichment Analysis Representation) which leverages similarities between the pathway gene sets and represents them as a network of interconnected clusters. Each cluster is assigned a meaningful name that highlights the main biological themes in the experiment. Our approach enables an automated and objective overview of the data without manual and time-consuming parameter tweaking. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: The package aPEAR is implemented in R, published under the MIT open-source licence. The source code, documentation, and usage instructions are available on https://gitlab.com/vugene/aPEAR as well as on CRAN (https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=aPEAR).