What is the difference between functional enrichment analysis and canonical pathway analysis?

Question

[JH]

What is the difference between functional enrichment analysis and canonical pathway analysis?

[Friederike]

Are you referring to two IPA functions or are you getting at the difference between IPA's canonical pathway analysis and other tools' functional enrichment analyses?

[JH]

two IPA functions when database is equal! Is there any conceptual difference between functional enrichment analysis and canonical pathway analysis?

[Friederike]

Did you try the help of IPA? As I remember it, they have fairly extensive documentation, but it's only available to those with a valid membership.

Answer 1

[shiyang_bio]

Not familiar with IPA. But in principle, they should have minimal difference because both are using some statistical method to test whether your genelist is significantly enriched in a pathway. Maybe they used different pathway database, I guess.

[JH]

When the experimental data are the same, is there any difference of the results between the two methods?