Fig. 1.

Conventional statistical methods vs. MERGE. a Conventional methods identify gene expression markers for drugs based on expression data and drug sensitivity data. They measure the statistical significance of associations between expression levels for each gene and sensitivity measures for each drug. b The MERGE framework models the marker potential (MERGE score) of each gene based on a weighted combination of the gene’s driver features. MERGE simultaneously learns the driver feature weights (and correspondingly, MERGE scores for all genes) and the impact of the MERGE score on the observed gene-drug associations