Abstract
To analyze gene expression data with sophisticated grouping structures and to extract hidden patterns from such data, feature selection is of critical importance. It is well known that genes do not function in isolation but rather work together within various metabolic, regulatory, and signaling pathways. If the biological knowledge contained within these pathways is taken into account, the resulting method is a pathway-based algorithm. Studies have demonstrated that a pathway-based method usually outperforms its gene-based counterpart in which no biological knowledge is considered. In this article, a pathway-based feature selection is firstly divided into three major categories, namely, pathway-level selection, bilevel selection, and pathway-guided gene selection. With bilevel selection methods being regarded as a special case of pathway-guided gene selection process, we discuss pathway-guided gene selection methods in detail and the importance of penalization in such methods. Last, we point out the potential utilizations of pathway-guided gene selection in one active research avenue, namely, to analyze longitudinal gene expression data. We believe this article provides valuable insights for computational biologists and biostatisticians so that they can make biology more computable.
Document Type
Review
Publication Date
4-3-2019
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
https://doi.org/10.1155/2019/2497509
Funding Information
This study was supported by a fund (no. 31401123) from the Natural Science Foundation of China.
Repository Citation
Tian, Suyan; Wang, Chi; and Wang, Bing, "Incorporating Pathway Information into Feature Selection Towards Better Performed Gene Signatures" (2019). Biostatistics Faculty Publications. 45.
https://uknowledge.uky.edu/biostatistics_facpub/45
Notes/Citation Information
Published in Biomed Research International, v. 2019, article ID 2497509, p. 1-12.
Copyright © 2019 Suyan Tian et al.
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.