It is significant but challenging to explore a subset of robust biomarkers to distinguish cancer from normal samples on high-dimensional imbalanced cancer biological omics data. Although many feature selection methods addressing high dimensionality and class imbalance have been proposed, they rarely pay attention to the fact that most classes will dominate the final decision-making when the dataset is imbalanced, leading to instability when it expands downstream tasks. Because of causality invariance, causal relationship inference is considered an effective way to improve machine learning performance and stability. This paper proposes a Causality-inspired Least Angle Nonlinear Distributed (CLAND) feature selection method, consisting of two branches with a class-wised branch and a sample-wised branch representing two deconfounder strategies, respectively. We compared the performance of CLAND with other advanced feature selection methods in transcriptional data of six cancer types with different imbalance ratios. The genes selected by CLAND have superior accuracy, stability, and generalization in the downstream classification tasks, indicating potential causality for identifying cancer samples. Furthermore, these genes have also been demonstrated to play an essential role in cancer initiation and progression through reviewing the literature.
Critical pattern selection method for full-chip source and mask optimization