Dataset Information

Feature selection and molecular classification of cancer using genetic programming.

ABSTRACT: Despite important advances in microarray-based molecular classification of tumors, its application in clinical settings remains formidable. This is in part due to the limitation of current analysis programs in discovering robust biomarkers and developing classifiers with a practical set of genes. Genetic programming (GP) is a type of machine learning technique that uses evolutionary algorithm to simulate natural selection as well as population dynamics, hence leading to simple and comprehensible classifiers. Here we applied GP to cancer expression profiling data to select feature genes and build molecular classifiers by mathematical integration of these genes. Analysis of thousands of GP classifiers generated for a prostate cancer data set revealed repetitive use of a set of highly discriminative feature genes, many of which are known to be disease associated. GP classifiers often comprise five or less genes and successfully predict cancer types and subtypes. More importantly, GP classifiers generated in one study are able to predict samples from an independent study, which may have used different microarray platforms. In addition, GP yielded classification accuracy better than or similar to conventional classification methods. Furthermore, the mathematical expression of GP classifiers provides insights into relationships between classifier genes. Taken together, our results demonstrate that GP may be valuable for generating effective classifiers containing a practical set of genes for diagnostic/prognostic cancer classification.

SUBMITTER: Yu J

PROVIDER: S-EPMC1854845 | biostudies-other | 2007 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-other

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Feature selection and molecular classification of cancer using genetic programming.

Yu Jianjun J Yu Jindan J Almal Arpit A AA Dhanasekaran Saravana M SM Ghosh Debashis D Worzel William P WP Chinnaiyan Arul M AM

Neoplasia (New York, N.Y.) 20070401 4

Despite important advances in microarray-based molecular classification of tumors, its application in clinical settings remains formidable. This is in part due to the limitation of current analysis programs in discovering robust biomarkers and developing classifiers with a practical set of genes. Genetic programming (GP) is a type of machine learning technique that uses evolutionary algorithm to simulate natural selection as well as population dynamics, hence leading to simple and comprehensible ...[more]

PMID: 17460773

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Project description:BackgroundMicroRNAs (miRNAs) are noncoding RNA molecules heavily involved in human tumors, in which few of them circulating the human body. Finding a tumor-associated signature of miRNA, that is, the minimum miRNA entities to be measured for discriminating both different types of cancer and normal tissues, is of utmost importance. Feature selection techniques applied in machine learning can help however they often provide naive or biased results.ResultsAn ensemble feature selection strategy for miRNA signatures is proposed. miRNAs are chosen based on consensus on feature relevance from high-accuracy classifiers of different typologies. This methodology aims to identify signatures that are considerably more robust and reliable when used in clinically relevant prediction tasks. Using the proposed method, a 100-miRNA signature is identified in a dataset of 8023 samples, extracted from TCGA. When running eight-state-of-the-art classifiers along with the 100-miRNA signature against the original 1046 features, it could be detected that global accuracy differs only by 1.4%. Importantly, this 100-miRNA signature is sufficient to distinguish between tumor and normal tissues. The approach is then compared against other feature selection methods, such as UFS, RFE, EN, LASSO, Genetic Algorithms, and EFS-CLA. The proposed approach provides better accuracy when tested on a 10-fold cross-validation with different classifiers and it is applied to several GEO datasets across different platforms with some classifiers showing more than 90% classification accuracy, which proves its cross-platform applicability.ConclusionsThe 100-miRNA signature is sufficiently stable to provide almost the same classification accuracy as the complete TCGA dataset, and it is further validated on several GEO datasets, across different types of cancer and platforms. Furthermore, a bibliographic analysis confirms that 77 out of the 100 miRNAs in the signature appear in lists of circulating miRNAs used in cancer studies, in stem-loop or mature-sequence form. The remaining 23 miRNAs offer potentially promising avenues for future research.

Dataset Information

Feature selection and molecular classification of cancer using genetic programming.

Publications

Feature selection and molecular classification of cancer using genetic programming.

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