Tool choice matters: Evaluating edgeR vs. DESeq2 for sensitivity, robustness, and cross-study performance

by Mostafa Rezapour

Differential gene expression (DGE) analysis is foundational to transcriptomic research, yet tool selection can substantially influence results. This study compares two widely used DGE tools, edgeR and DESeq2, using real and semi-simulated bulk RNA-Seq data sets, mostly from human patients, spanning viral infection, bacterial infection, and fibrotic conditions. We evaluated tool performance across four dimensions: (1) sensitivity to sample size and robustness to outliers; (2) classification performance of uniquely identified gene sets within the discovery dataset; (3) pathway-level concordance of significant DEG sets; and (4) generalizability of tool-specific gene sets across independent studies. First, using Bonferroni-adjusted p-value 2 fold change greater than 1 (i.e., |log2FC|>1) as significance criteria, repeated subsampling showed that DESeq2 generally identified more Differentially Expressed Genes (DEGs) than edgeR at smaller sample sizes, while the tools became more concordant as sample size increased. Both tools showed similar responses to simulated outliers, with Jaccard similarity decreasing as more swapped samples were introduced. Second, classification models trained on tool-specific genes showed that edgeR achieved higher F1 scores in 9 of 13 contrasts and more frequently reached perfect or near-perfect precision. Third, Hallmark and KEGG pathway enrichment analyses showed that many contrasts retained substantial pathway-level agreement between tools, although selected contrasts still showed tool-specific enriched pathways. Finally, in cross-study validation using four independent SARS-CoV-2 datasets, edgeR-specific genes yielded higher AUC, precision, and recall in held-out datasets, with some test cases achieving perfect separation. Overall, our findings show that DESeq2 may identify more DEGs under stringent thresholds, whereas edgeR often yields more conservative, predictive, and generalizable gene sets. These findings emphasize that DGE tool choice should be guided not only by DEG yield, but also by the downstream reproducibility, predictive value, and biological interpretability of the resulting gene sets.