Fuzzy mutual information based grouping and new fitness function for PSO in selection of miRNAs in cancer

Agent-based approaches for biological modeling in oncology: A literature review

CONTEXT

Computational modeling involves the use of computer simulations and models to study and understand real-world phenomena. Its application is particularly relevant in the study of potential interactions between biological elements. It is a promising approach to understand complex biological processes and predict their behavior under various conditions.

METHODOLOGY

This paper is a review of the recent literature on computational modeling of biological systems. Our study focuses on the field of oncology and the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and, in particular, agent-based modeling (ABM), between 2010 and May 2023.

RESULTS

Most of the articles studied focus on improving the diagnosis and understanding the behaviors of biological entities, with metaheuristic algorithms being the models most used. Several challenges are highlighted regarding increasing and structuring knowledge about biological systems, developing holistic models that capture multiple scales and levels of organization, reproducing emergent behaviors of biological systems, validating models with experimental data, improving computational performance of models and algorithms, and ensuring privacy and personal data protection are discussed.

Graph-based relevancy-redundancy gene selection method for cancer diagnosis

Nowadays, microarray data processing is one of the most important applications in molecular biology for cancer diagnosis. A major task in microarray data processing is gene selection, which aims to find a subset of genes with the least inner similarity and most relevant to the target class. Removing unnecessary, redundant, or noisy data reduces the data dimensionality. This research advocates a graph theoretic-based gene selection method for cancer diagnosis. Both unsupervised and supervised modes use well-known and successful social network approaches such as the maximum weighted clique criterion and edge centrality to rank genes. The suggested technique has two goals: (i) to maximize the relevancy of the chosen genes with the target class and (ii) to reduce their inner redundancy. A maximum weighted clique is chosen in a repetitive way in each iteration of this procedure. The appropriate genes are then chosen from among the existing features in this maximum clique using edge centrality and gene relevance. In the experiment, several datasets consisting of Colon, Leukemia, SRBCT, Prostate Tumor, and Lung Cancer, with different properties, are used to demonstrate the efficacy of the developed model. Our performance is compared to that of renowned filter-based gene selection approaches for cancer diagnosis whose results demonstrate a clear superiority.

Explainable machine learning for knee osteoarthritis diagnosis based on a novel fuzzy feature selection methodology

Knee Osteoarthritis (ΚΟΑ) is a degenerative joint disease of the knee that results from the progressive loss of cartilage. Due to KOA's multifactorial nature and the poor understanding of its pathophysiology, there is a need for reliable tools that will reduce diagnostic errors made by clinicians. The existence of public databases has facilitated the advent of advanced analytics in KOA research however the heterogeneity of the available data along with the observed high feature dimensionality make this diagnosis task difficult. The objective of the present study is to provide a robust Feature Selection (FS) methodology that could: (i) handle the multidimensional nature of the available datasets and (ii) alleviate the defectiveness of existing feature selection techniques towards the identification of important risk factors which contribute to KOA diagnosis. For this aim, we used multidimensional data obtained from the Osteoarthritis Initiative database for individuals without or with KOA. The proposed fuzzy ensemble feature selection methodology aggregates the results of several FS algorithms (filter, wrapper and embedded ones) based on fuzzy logic. The effectiveness of the proposed methodology was evaluated using an extensive experimental setup that involved multiple competing FS algorithms and several well-known ML models. A 73.55% classification accuracy was achieved by the best performing model (Random Forest classifier) on a group of twenty-one selected risk factors. Explainability analysis was finally performed to quantify the impact of the selected features on the model's output thus enhancing our understanding of the rationale behind the decision-making mechanism of the best model.

Identification of most important features based on a fuzzy ensemble technique: Evaluation on joint space narrowing progression in knee osteoarthritis patients

OBJECTIVE

Feature selection (FS) is a crucial and at the same time challenging processing step that aims to reduce the dimensionality of complex classification or regression problems. Various techniques have been proposed in the literature to address this challenge with emphasis to medical applications. However, each one of the existing FS algorithms come with its own advantages and disadvantages introducing a certain level of bias.

MATERIALS AND METHODS

To avoid bias and alleviate the defectiveness of single feature selection results, an ensemble FS methodology is proposed in this paper that aggregates the results of several FS algorithms (filter, wrapper and embedded ones). Fuzzy logic is employed to combine multiple feature importance scores thus leading to a more robust selection of informative features. The proposed fuzzy ensemble FS methodology was applied on the problem of knee osteoarthritis (KOA) prediction with special emphasis on the progression of joint space narrowing (JSN). The proposed FS methodology was integrated into an end-to-end machine learning pipeline and a thorough experimental evaluation was conducted using data from the Osteoarthritis Initiative (OAI) database. Several classifiers were investigated for their suitability in the task of JSN prediction and the best performing model was then post-hoc analyzed by using the SHAP method.

RESULTS

The results showed that the proposed method presented a better and more stable performance in contrast to other competitive feature selection methods, leading to an average accuracy of 78.14% using XG Boost at 31 selected features. The post-hoc explainability highlighted the important features that contribute to the classification of patients with JSN progression.

CONCLUSIONS

The proposed fuzzy feature selection approach improves the performance of the predictive models by selecting a small optimal subset of features compared to popular feature selection methods.