Abstract

Background: It has been demonstrated that a pathway-based feature selection method that incorporates biological information within pathways during the process of feature selection usually outperforms a gene-based feature selection algorithm in terms of predictive accuracy and stability. Significance analysis of microarray-gene set reduction algorithm (SAMGSR), an extension to a gene set analysis method with further reduction of the selected pathways to their respective core subsets, can be regarded as a pathway-based feature selection method.

Methods: In SAMGSR, whether a gene is selected is mainly determined by its expression difference between the phenotypes, and partially by the number of pathways to which this gene belongs. It ignores the topology information among pathways. In this study, we propose a weighted version of the SAMGSR algorithm by constructing weights based on the connectivity among genes and then combing these weights with the test statistics.

Results: Using both simulated and real-world data, we evaluate the performance of the proposed SAMGSR extension and demonstrate that the weighted version outperforms its original version.

Conclusions: To conclude, the additional gene connectivity information does faciliatate feature selection.

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

9-29-2016

Notes/Citation Information

Published in Biology Direct, v. 11, 50, p. 1-15.

© The Author(s). 2016

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

https://doi.org/10.1186/s13062-016-0152-3

Funding Information

This study was supported by a fund (No. 31401123) from the Natural Science Foundation of China.

13062_2016_152_MOESM1_ESM.docx (76 kB)
Additional file 1: R codes for the weighted-SAMGSR algorithm.

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