Motivation: One of the recently developed statistics for identifying differentially expressed genetic networks is Hotelling T2 statistic, which is a quadratic form of difference in linear functions of means of gene expressions between two types of tissue samples, and so their power is limited.

Results: To improve the power of test statistics, a general statistical framework for construction of non-linear tests is presented, and two specific non-linear test statistics that use non-linear transformations of means are developed. Asymptotical distributions of the non-linear test statistics under the null and alternative hypothesis are derived. It has been proved that under some conditions the power of the non-linear test statistics is higher than that of the T2 statistic. Besides theory, to evaluate in practice the performance of the non-linear test statistics, they are applied to two real datasets. The preliminary results demonstrate that the P-values of the non-linear statistics for testing differential expressions of the genetic networks are much smaller than those of the T2 statistic. And furthermore simulations show the Type I errors of the non-linear statistics agree with the threshold used and the statistics fit the chi2 distribution.

Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available on Bioinformatics online.