If we need design a computational approach to systematically find if a gene, specially a cell cycle gene, is a suppressor or a oncogene, without mining a database, how would we go about analyzing the relevant data (mutations, CN, expression, miRNA)?

The post - Database Of Tumor Suppressors And/Or Oncogenes was very helpful in finding the gene in relevant databases. But, if we need to explain to an introductory bioinformatics class, what is the best way to design a computational approach?