To measure the performance of our method and to compare it with similar approaches, we used (i) an artificial synthetic dataset (artificial dataset); (ii) a dataset consisting of selected samples from a breast cancer patient series where the imbalanced signal is introduced by the presence or absence of HER2-positive tumors (HER2 dataset); and (iii) a mouse dataset for which a functionally validated gene implicated in chemotherapy resistance is known (mouse dataset; see ‘Materials and Methods’ section for a detailed description of the datasets). Here, ERBB2 is linked to breast cancer.