Gene set enrichment analysis vs functional enrichment analysis?

Question

[justp]

I'm confused about what these two are.

I saw functional enrichment analysis being used to describe when someone takes a gene list and runs it through DAVID and GSEA being referred to as functional enrichment analysis.

I thought you needed your own expression data to do GSEA, how does DAVID work then?

Answer 1

[jared.andrews07]

DAVID just uses GO/pathway associations with a list of genes you feed it to determine if the set is enriched for a specific function. I personally hate its UI and would recommend GeneSCF or enrichr over it.

And for GSEA, you don't necessarily need your own expression data, you can use publicly available expression data.

[justp]

Where can I find these GSEA options for other databases. I'm trying to do some analysis with a list of genes that I have read are involved in a pathway, but I don't have expression data from any experiments.

[jared.andrews07]

Actually, I made a mistake, it provides a bunch of gene sets to be used with your expression data, not the reverse. They can be found here, I'll update my answer as well.