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Many accurate small-discriminatory feature subsets exist in microarray transcript data: biomarker discovery.

ABSTRACT: BACKGROUND: Molecular profiling generates abundance measurements for thousands of gene transcripts in biological samples such as normal and tumor tissues (data points). Given such two-class high-dimensional data, many methods have been proposed for classifying data points into one of the two classes. However, finding very small sets of features able to correctly classify the data is problematic as the fundamental mathematical proposition is hard. Existing methods can find "small" feature sets, but give no hint how close this is to the true minimum size. Without fundamental mathematical advances, finding true minimum-size sets will remain elusive, and more importantly for the microarray community there will be no methods for finding them. RESULTS: We use the brute force approach of exhaustive search through all genes, gene pairs (and for some data sets gene triples). Each unique gene combination is analyzed with a few-parameter linear-hyperplane classification method looking for those combinations that form training error-free classifiers. All 10 published data sets studied are found to contain predictive small feature sets. Four contain thousands of gene pairs and 6 have single genes that perfectly discriminate. CONCLUSION: This technique discovered small sets of genes (3 or less) in published data that form accurate classifiers, yet were not reported in the prior publications. This could be a common characteristic of microarray data, thus making looking for them worth the computational cost. Such small gene sets could indicate biomarkers and portend simple medical diagnostic tests. We recommend checking for small gene sets routinely. We find 4 gene pairs and many gene triples in the large hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC, Liver cancer) data set of Chen et al. The key component of these is the "placental gene of unknown function", PLAC8. Our HMM modeling indicates PLAC8 might have a domain like part of lP59's crystal structure (a Non-Covalent Endonuclease lii-Dna Complex). The previously identified HCC biomarker gene, glypican 3 (GPC3), is part of an accurate gene triple involving MT1E and ARHE. We also find small gene sets that distinguish leukemia subtypes in the large pediatric acute lymphoblastic leukemia cancer set of Yeoh et al.

SUBMITTER: Grate LR

PROVIDER: S-EPMC1090559 | biostudies-literature | 2005

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Many accurate small-discriminatory feature subsets exist in microarray transcript data: biomarker discovery.

Grate Leslie R LR

BMC bioinformatics 20050413

<h4>Background</h4>Molecular profiling generates abundance measurements for thousands of gene transcripts in biological samples such as normal and tumor tissues (data points). Given such two-class high-dimensional data, many methods have been proposed for classifying data points into one of the two classes. However, finding very small sets of features able to correctly classify the data is problematic as the fundamental mathematical proposition is hard. Existing methods can find "small" feature ...[more]

PMID: 15826317

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Project description:Motivation: Monitoring, assessment and prediction of environmental risks that chemicals pose demand rapid and accurate diagnostic assays. A variety of toxicological effects have been associated with explosive compounds TNT and RDX. One important goal of microarray experiments is to discover novel biomarkers for toxicity evaluation. We have developed an earthworm microarray containing 15,208 unique oligo probes. Our objective was to identify biomarker genes that can separate earthworm samples into three groups: control, TNT-treated, and RDX-treated. Results: We developed a discriminant analysis and cluster (DAC) pipeline to analyze a 248-array dataset. First, a total of 869 significantly changed genes in response to TNT or RDX exposure were inferred by class comparison statistical algorithms. Then, nine decision tree-based algorithms were applied to generate classification rules and a set of 286 classifier genes. These classifier genes were ranked by their overall weight of significance, and were used to build support vector machines (SVMs). An SVM containing all 286 classifier genes had the highest classification accuracy (91.5%). An unsupervised clustering method was used to cluster the worm samples and results show that the use of the top 100 classifier genes can assign the largest number of worm samples into the three reference clusters obtained by using all the 14,188 filtered genes, suggesting that these top-ranked genes may be potential candidates for biomarkers. This study demonstrates that the DAC pipeline can be used to identify a small set of biomarker genes from high dimensional datasets and generate a reliable SVM classification model for multiple classes. Adult earthworms (E. fetida) were exposed in soil spiked with TNT (0, 6, 12, 24, 48, or 96 mg/kg) or RDX (8, 16, 32, 64, or 128 mg/kg) for 0, 4 or 14 days. The 4-day treatment was repeated with RDX concentration being 2, 4, 8, 16 or 32 mg/kg soil. Each treatment originally had 10 replicate worms with 8-10 survivors at the end of exposure. Total RNA was isolated from the surviving worms. A total of 248 worm RNA samples were hybridized to a custom-designed oligo array using Agilentâs one-color Low RNA Input Linear Amplification Kit. The array contains 15,208 non-redundant 60-mer probes, each targeting a unique E. fetida transcript (Gong et al. 2009). After hybridization and scanning, gene expression data were acquired using Agilentâs Feature Extraction Software (v.9.1.3). The 248-array dataset consists of three worm groups: 32 untreated controls, 96 TNT-treated, and 120 RDX-treated.

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Project description:In this paper, we compare the performance of six different feature selection methods for LC-MS-based proteomics and metabolomics biomarker discovery-t test, the Mann-Whitney-Wilcoxon test (mww test), nearest shrunken centroid (NSC), linear support vector machine-recursive features elimination (SVM-RFE), principal component discriminant analysis (PCDA), and partial least squares discriminant analysis (PLSDA)-using human urine and porcine cerebrospinal fluid samples that were spiked with a range of peptides at different concentration levels. The ideal feature selection method should select the complete list of discriminating features that are related to the spiked peptides without selecting unrelated features. Whereas many studies have to rely on classification error to judge the reliability of the selected biomarker candidates, we assessed the accuracy of selection directly from the list of spiked peptides. The feature selection methods were applied to data sets with different sample sizes and extents of sample class separation determined by the concentration level of spiked compounds. For each feature selection method and data set, the performance for selecting a set of features related to spiked compounds was assessed using the harmonic mean of the recall and the precision (f-score) and the geometric mean of the recall and the true negative rate (g-score). We conclude that the univariate t test and the mww test with multiple testing corrections are not applicable to data sets with small sample sizes (n = 6), but their performance improves markedly with increasing sample size up to a point (n > 12) at which they outperform the other methods. PCDA and PLSDA select small feature sets with high precision but miss many true positive features related to the spiked peptides. NSC strikes a reasonable compromise between recall and precision for all data sets independent of spiking level and number of samples. Linear SVM-RFE performs poorly for selecting features related to the spiked compounds, even though the classification error is relatively low.

Dataset Information

Many accurate small-discriminatory feature subsets exist in microarray transcript data: biomarker discovery.

Publications

Many accurate small-discriminatory feature subsets exist in microarray transcript data: biomarker discovery.

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