scholarly journals Comprior: facilitating the implementation and automated benchmarking of prior knowledge-based feature selection approaches on gene expression data sets

2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Cindy Perscheid

Abstract Background Reproducible benchmarking is important for assessing the effectiveness of novel feature selection approaches applied on gene expression data, especially for prior knowledge approaches that incorporate biological information from online knowledge bases. However, no full-fledged benchmarking system exists that is extensible, provides built-in feature selection approaches, and a comprehensive result assessment encompassing classification performance, robustness, and biological relevance. Moreover, the particular needs of prior knowledge feature selection approaches, i.e. uniform access to knowledge bases, are not addressed. As a consequence, prior knowledge approaches are not evaluated amongst each other, leaving open questions regarding their effectiveness. Results We present the Comprior benchmark tool, which facilitates the rapid development and effortless benchmarking of feature selection approaches, with a special focus on prior knowledge approaches. Comprior is extensible by custom approaches, offers built-in standard feature selection approaches, enables uniform access to multiple knowledge bases, and provides a customizable evaluation infrastructure to compare multiple feature selection approaches regarding their classification performance, robustness, runtime, and biological relevance. Conclusion Comprior allows reproducible benchmarking especially of prior knowledge approaches, which facilitates their applicability and for the first time enables a comprehensive assessment of their effectiveness.

Author(s):  
Cindy Perscheid

Abstract Gene expression data provide the expression levels of tens of thousands of genes from several hundred samples. These data are analyzed to detect biomarkers that can be of prognostic or diagnostic use. Traditionally, biomarker detection for gene expression data is the task of gene selection. The vast number of genes is reduced to a few relevant ones that achieve the best performance for the respective use case. Traditional approaches select genes based on their statistical significance in the data set. This results in issues of robustness, redundancy and true biological relevance of the selected genes. Integrative analyses typically address these shortcomings by integrating multiple data artifacts from the same objects, e.g. gene expression and methylation data. When only gene expression data are available, integrative analyses instead use curated information on biological processes from public knowledge bases. With knowledge bases providing an ever-increasing amount of curated biological knowledge, such prior knowledge approaches become more powerful. This paper provides a thorough overview on the status quo of biomarker detection on gene expression data with prior biological knowledge. We discuss current shortcomings of traditional approaches, review recent external knowledge bases, provide a classification and qualitative comparison of existing prior knowledge approaches and discuss open challenges for this kind of gene selection.


2019 ◽  
Vol 21 (9) ◽  
pp. 631-645 ◽  
Author(s):  
Saeed Ahmed ◽  
Muhammad Kabir ◽  
Zakir Ali ◽  
Muhammad Arif ◽  
Farman Ali ◽  
...  

Aim and Objective: Cancer is a dangerous disease worldwide, caused by somatic mutations in the genome. Diagnosis of this deadly disease at an early stage is exceptionally new clinical application of microarray data. In DNA microarray technology, gene expression data have a high dimension with small sample size. Therefore, the development of efficient and robust feature selection methods is indispensable that identify a small set of genes to achieve better classification performance. Materials and Methods: In this study, we developed a hybrid feature selection method that integrates correlation-based feature selection (CFS) and Multi-Objective Evolutionary Algorithm (MOEA) approaches which select the highly informative genes. The hybrid model with Redial base function neural network (RBFNN) classifier has been evaluated on 11 benchmark gene expression datasets by employing a 10-fold cross-validation test. Results: The experimental results are compared with seven conventional-based feature selection and other methods in the literature, which shows that our approach owned the obvious merits in the aspect of classification accuracy ratio and some genes selected by extensive comparing with other methods. Conclusion: Our proposed CFS-MOEA algorithm attained up to 100% classification accuracy for six out of eleven datasets with a minimal sized predictive gene subset.


2020 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shuhei Kimura ◽  
Ryo Fukutomi ◽  
Masato Tokuhisa ◽  
Mariko Okada

Several researchers have focused on random-forest-based inference methods because of their excellent performance. Some of these inference methods also have a useful ability to analyze both time-series and static gene expression data. However, they are only of use in ranking all of the candidate regulations by assigning them confidence values. None have been capable of detecting the regulations that actually affect a gene of interest. In this study, we propose a method to remove unpromising candidate regulations by combining the random-forest-based inference method with a series of feature selection methods. In addition to detecting unpromising regulations, our proposed method uses outputs from the feature selection methods to adjust the confidence values of all of the candidate regulations that have been computed by the random-forest-based inference method. Numerical experiments showed that the combined application with the feature selection methods improved the performance of the random-forest-based inference method on 99 of the 100 trials performed on the artificial problems. However, the improvement tends to be small, since our combined method succeeded in removing only 19% of the candidate regulations at most. The combined application with the feature selection methods moreover makes the computational cost higher. While a bigger improvement at a lower computational cost would be ideal, we see no impediments to our investigation, given that our aim is to extract as much useful information as possible from a limited amount of gene expression data.


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