Gene Selection using a High-Dimensional Regression Model with Microarrays in Cancer Prognostic Studies

Supervised Dimension Reduction for Large-Scale "Omics" Data With Censored Survival Outcomes Under Possible Non-Proportional Hazards

The past two decades have witnessed significant advances in high-throughput "omics" technologies such as genomics, proteomics, metabolomics, transcriptomics and radiomics. These technologies have enabled simultaneous measurement of the expression levels of tens of thousands of features from individual patient samples and have generated enormous amounts of data that require analysis and interpretation. One specific area of interest has been in studying the relationship between these features and patient outcomes, such as overall and recurrence-free survival, with the goal of developing a predictive "omics" profile. Large-scale studies often suffer from the presence of a large fraction of censored observations and potential time-varying effects of features, and methods for handling them have been lacking. In this paper, we propose supervised methods for feature selection and survival prediction that simultaneously deal with both issues. Our approach utilizes continuum power regression (CPR) - a framework that includes a variety of regression methods - in conjunction with the parametric or semi-parametric accelerated failure time (AFT) model. Both CPR and AFT fall within the linear models framework and, unlike black-box models, the proposed prognostic index has a simple yet useful interpretation. We demonstrate the utility of our methods using simulated and publicly available cancer genomics data.

Prediction of survival risks with adjusted gene expression through risk-gene networks

MOTIVATION

Network-based analysis of biomedical data has been extensively studied over the last decades. As a successful application, gene networks have been used to illustrate interactions among genes and explain the associated phenotypes. However, the gene network approaches have not been actively applied for survival analysis, which is one of the main interests of biomedical research. In addition, a few previous studies using gene networks for survival analysis construct networks mainly from prior knowledge, such as pathways, regulations and gene sets, while the performance considerably depends on the selection of prior knowledge.

RESULTS

In this paper, we propose a data-driven construction method for survival risk-gene networks as well as a survival risk prediction method using the network structure. The proposed method constructs risk-gene networks with survival-associated genes using penalized regression. Then, gene expression indices are hierarchically adjusted through the networks to reduce the variance intrinsic in datasets. By illustrating risk-gene structure, the proposed method is expected to provide an intuition for the relationship between genes and survival risks. The risk-gene network is applied to a low grade glioma dataset, and produces a hypothesis of the relationship between genetic biomarkers of low and high grade glioma. Moreover, with multiple datasets, we demonstrate that the proposed method shows superior prediction performance compared to other conventional methods.

AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION

The R package of risk-gene networks is freely available in the web at http://cdal.korea.ac.kr/NetDA/.

SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION

Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

Enhancing the Lasso Approach for Developing a Survival Prediction Model Based on Gene Expression Data

In the past decade, researchers in oncology have sought to develop survival prediction models using gene expression data. The least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (lasso) has been widely used to select genes that truly correlated with a patient's survival. The lasso selects genes for prediction by shrinking a large number of coefficients of the candidate genes towards zero based on a tuning parameter that is often determined by a cross-validation (CV). However, this method can pass over (or fail to identify) true positive genes (i.e., it identifies false negatives) in certain instances, because the lasso tends to favor the development of a simple prediction model. Here, we attempt to monitor the identification of false negatives by developing a method for estimating the number of true positive (TP) genes for a series of values of a tuning parameter that assumes a mixture distribution for the lasso estimates. Using our developed method, we performed a simulation study to examine its precision in estimating the number of TP genes. Additionally, we applied our method to a real gene expression dataset and found that it was able to identify genes correlated with survival that a CV method was unable to detect.

Prediction of early breast cancer metastasis from DNA microarray data using high-dimensional cox regression models

BACKGROUND

DNA microarray studies identified gene expression signatures predictive of metastatic relapse in early breast cancer. Standard feature selection procedures applied to reduce the set of predictive genes did not take into account the correlation between genes. In this paper, we studied the performances of three high-dimensional regression methods – CoxBoost, LASSO (Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator), and Elastic net – to identify prognostic signatures in patients with early breast cancer.

METHODS

We analyzed three public retrospective datasets, including a total of 384 patients with axillary lymph node-negative breast cancer. The Amsterdam van’t Veer’s training set of 78 patients was used to determine the optimal gene sets and classifiers using sensitivity thresholds resulting in mis-classification of no more than 10% of the poor-prognosis group. To ensure the comparability between different methods, an automatic selection procedure was used to determine the number of genes included in each model. The van de Vijver’s and Desmedt’s datasets were used as validation sets to evaluate separately the prognostic performances of our classifiers. The results were compared to the original Amsterdam 70-gene classifier.

RESULTS

The automatic selection procedure reduced the number of predictive genes up to a minimum of six genes. In the two validation sets, the three models (Elastic net, LASSO, and CoxBoost) led to the definition of genomic classifiers predicting the 5-year metastatic status with similar performances, with respective 59, 56, and 54% accuracy, 83, 75, and 83% sensitivity, and 53, 52, and 48% specificity in the Desmedt’s dataset. In comparison, the Amsterdam 70-gene signature showed 45% accuracy, 97% sensitivity, and 34% specificity. The gene overlap and the classification concordance between the three classifiers were high. All the classifiers added significant prognostic information to that provided by the traditional prognostic factors and showed a very high overlap with respect to gene ontologies (GOs) associated with genes overexpressed in the predicted poor-prognosis vs. good-prognosis classes and centred on cell proliferation. Interestingly, all classifiers reported high sensitivity to predict the 4-year status of metastatic disease.

CONCLUSIONS

High-dimensional regression methods are attractive in prognostic studies because finding a small subset of genes may facilitate the transfer to the clinic, and also because they strengthen the robustness of the model by limiting the selection of false-positive predictive genes. With only six genes, the CoxBoost classifier predicted the 4-year status of metastatic disease with 93% sensitivity. Selecting a few genes related to ontologies other than cell proliferation might further improve the overall sensitivity performance.

New bandwidth selection criterion for Kernel PCA: approach to dimensionality reduction and classification problems

BACKGROUND

DNA microarrays are potentially powerful technology for improving diagnostic classification, treatment selection, and prognostic assessment. The use of this technology to predict cancer outcome has a history of almost a decade. Disease class predictors can be designed for known disease cases and provide diagnostic confirmation or clarify abnormal cases. The main input to this class predictors are high dimensional data with many variables and few observations. Dimensionality reduction of these features set significantly speeds up the prediction task. Feature selection and feature transformation methods are well known preprocessing steps in the field of bioinformatics. Several prediction tools are available based on these techniques.

RESULTS

Studies show that a well tuned Kernel PCA (KPCA) is an efficient preprocessing step for dimensionality reduction, but the available bandwidth selection method for KPCA was computationally expensive. In this paper, we propose a new data-driven bandwidth selection criterion for KPCA, which is related to least squares cross-validation for kernel density estimation. We propose a new prediction model with a well tuned KPCA and Least Squares Support Vector Machine (LS-SVM). We estimate the accuracy of the newly proposed model based on 9 case studies. Then, we compare its performances (in terms of test set Area Under the ROC Curve (AUC) and computational time) with other well known techniques such as whole data set + LS-SVM, PCA + LS-SVM, t-test + LS-SVM, Prediction Analysis of Microarrays (PAM) and Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator (Lasso). Finally, we assess the performance of the proposed strategy with an existing KPCA parameter tuning algorithm by means of two additional case studies.

CONCLUSION

We propose, evaluate, and compare several mathematical/statistical techniques, which apply feature transformation/selection for subsequent classification, and consider its application in medical diagnostics. Both feature selection and feature transformation perform well on classification tasks. Due to the dynamic selection property of feature selection, it is hard to define significant features for the classifier, which predicts classes of future samples. Moreover, the proposed strategy enjoys a distinctive advantage with its relatively lesser time complexity.