Quantitative Enrichment Analysis

I have a few questions regarding the analysis. I couldn’t find any manual that will give some more details besides the technicalities of which buttons I should click…

  1. What is the difference between categorical and continuous in the group label field?

  2. The enrichment ratio is defined as: " * Enrichment Ratio is computed by Hits / Expected, where hits = observed hits; expected = expected hits (see the Table below)" - I have uploaded a file with analysis I did between two groups so if the answers can be related to this file, it will help me a lot:
    FOR Metaboanalyst Control vs Tram.csv (30.6 KB)
    I don’t understand what is “expected hits”. When I uploaded the current file, for examples, I recieved “12.5” as expected hits for all the pathways I uploaded. From where is this number coming? what does it mean?

  3. It seems that QEA works for two groups only. Meatboanalyst does not accept a file with multiple groups. If this is the case, it should matter which is the control group and which is the experimental group for the analysis, right? and if it is important, where do I define it?

  4. If there’s a video/tutorial that explains more thoroughly about the meaning of the analysis, a link would be highly appreciated.
    Thanks in advance,
    Ifat

For Q2, please see this post.

There are a lot of tutorials, publications and training courses. You can start with Using MetaboAnalyst 4.0 for Comprehensive and Integrative Metabolomics Data Analysis