Hi Caren,
The data in the screenshot you sent is
not normalized. Raw counts from standard (i.e. not the pseudoalignment tools like Kallisto or Salmon) are typically integer values like what you see here.
If the data was normalized you would expect to see fractional counts (i.e 13.1, 2750.4, etc instead of just 13, 2750, etc).
We always recommend count normalization before running GSEA. If you're having difficulty getting your copy of DESeq2 to produce normalized counts, we have a version of DESeq2 on GenePattern (
cloud.genepattern.org) that is designed to produce a normalized counts gct file that will work with GSEA as one of the outputs.
My inclination is to normalize all the samples together. That should give DESeq2 the best model possible of the count distributions that it needs for normalization.
As to your previous question about the Leading Edge analysis failing. If it is an intermittent issue with the exact same data, then it might be GSEA running out of system memory. If you quit and reopen GSEA, then reload the results folder from the filesystem, does it still happen?