Background The knowledge base-driven pathway analysis is becoming the first choice for many investigators, in that it not only can reduce the complexity of functional analysis by grouping thousands of genes into just several hundred pathways, but also can increase the explanatory power for the experiment by identifying active pathways in different conditions. However, current approaches are designed to analyze a biological system assuming that each pathway is independent of the other pathways. Results A decision analysis model is developed in this article that accounts for dependence among pathways in time-course experiments and multiple treatments experiments. This model introduces a decision coefficient—a designed index, to identify the most relevant pathways in a given experiment by taking into account not only the direct determination factor of each Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) pathway itself, but also the indirect determination factors from its related pathways. Meanwhile, the direct and indirect determination factors of each pathway are employed to demonstrate the regulation mechanisms among KEGG pathways, and the sign of decision coefficient can be used to preliminarily estimate the impact direction of each KEGG pathway. The simulation study of decision analysis demonstrated the application of decision analysis model for KEGG pathway analysis. Conclusions A microarray dataset from bovine mammary tissue over entire lactation cycle was used to further illustrate our strategy. The results showed that the decision analysis model can provide the promising and more biologically meaningful results. Therefore, the decision analysis model is an initial attempt of optimizing pathway analysis methodology. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12859-016-1285-1) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.