scholarly journals multiClust: An R-package for Identifying Biologically Relevant Clusters in Cancer Transcriptome Profiles

2016 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
pp. CIN.S38000 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nathan Lawlor ◽  
Alec Fabbri ◽  
Peiyong Guan ◽  
Joshy George ◽  
R. Krishna Murthy Karuturi

Clustering is carried out to identify patterns in transcriptomics profiles to determine clinically relevant subgroups of patients. Feature (gene) selection is a critical and an integral part of the process. Currently, there are many feature selection and clustering methods to identify the relevant genes and perform clustering of samples. However, choosing an appropriate methodology is difficult. In addition, extensive feature selection methods have not been supported by the available packages. Hence, we developed an integrative R-package called multiClust that allows researchers to experiment with the choice of combination of methods for gene selection and clustering with ease. Using multiClust, we identified the best performing clustering methodology in the context of clinical outcome. Our observations demonstrate that simple methods such as variance-based ranking perform well on the majority of data sets, provided that the appropriate number of genes is selected. However, different gene ranking and selection methods remain relevant as no methodology works for all studies.

2020 ◽  
Vol 21 (S18) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sudipta Acharya ◽  
Laizhong Cui ◽  
Yi Pan

Abstract Background In recent years, to investigate challenging bioinformatics problems, the utilization of multiple genomic and proteomic sources has become immensely popular among researchers. One such issue is feature or gene selection and identifying relevant and non-redundant marker genes from high dimensional gene expression data sets. In that context, designing an efficient feature selection algorithm exploiting knowledge from multiple potential biological resources may be an effective way to understand the spectrum of cancer or other diseases with applications in specific epidemiology for a particular population. Results In the current article, we design the feature selection and marker gene detection as a multi-view multi-objective clustering problem. Regarding that, we propose an Unsupervised Multi-View Multi-Objective clustering-based gene selection approach called UMVMO-select. Three important resources of biological data (gene ontology, protein interaction data, protein sequence) along with gene expression values are collectively utilized to design two different views. UMVMO-select aims to reduce gene space without/minimally compromising the sample classification efficiency and determines relevant and non-redundant gene markers from three cancer gene expression benchmark data sets. Conclusion A thorough comparative analysis has been performed with five clustering and nine existing feature selection methods with respect to several internal and external validity metrics. Obtained results reveal the supremacy of the proposed method. Reported results are also validated through a proper biological significance test and heatmap plotting.


2014 ◽  
Vol 2014 ◽  
pp. 1-9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hongyan Zhang ◽  
Lanzhi Li ◽  
Chao Luo ◽  
Congwei Sun ◽  
Yuan Chen ◽  
...  

In efforts to discover disease mechanisms and improve clinical diagnosis of tumors, it is useful to mine profiles for informative genes with definite biological meanings and to build robust classifiers with high precision. In this study, we developed a new method for tumor-gene selection, the Chi-square test-based integrated rank gene and direct classifier (χ2-IRG-DC). First, we obtained the weighted integrated rank of gene importance from chi-square tests of single and pairwise gene interactions. Then, we sequentially introduced the ranked genes and removed redundant genes by using leave-one-out cross-validation of the chi-square test-based Direct Classifier (χ2-DC) within the training set to obtain informative genes. Finally, we determined the accuracy of independent test data by utilizing the genes obtained above withχ2-DC. Furthermore, we analyzed the robustness ofχ2-IRG-DC by comparing the generalization performance of different models, the efficiency of different feature-selection methods, and the accuracy of different classifiers. An independent test of ten multiclass tumor gene-expression datasets showed thatχ2-IRG-DC could efficiently control overfitting and had higher generalization performance. The informative genes selected byχ2-IRG-DC could dramatically improve the independent test precision of other classifiers; meanwhile, the informative genes selected by other feature selection methods also had good performance inχ2-DC.


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yuan Zhao ◽  
Zhao-Yu Fang ◽  
Cui-Xiang Lin ◽  
Chao Deng ◽  
Yun-Pei Xu ◽  
...  

In recent years, the application of single cell RNA-seq (scRNA-seq) has become more and more popular in fields such as biology and medical research. Analyzing scRNA-seq data can discover complex cell populations and infer single-cell trajectories in cell development. Clustering is one of the most important methods to analyze scRNA-seq data. In this paper, we focus on improving scRNA-seq clustering through gene selection, which also reduces the dimensionality of scRNA-seq data. Studies have shown that gene selection for scRNA-seq data can improve clustering accuracy. Therefore, it is important to select genes with cell type specificity. Gene selection not only helps to reduce the dimensionality of scRNA-seq data, but also can improve cell type identification in combination with clustering methods. Here, we proposed RFCell, a supervised gene selection method, which is based on permutation and random forest classification. We first use RFCell and three existing gene selection methods to select gene sets on 10 scRNA-seq data sets. Then, three classical clustering algorithms are used to cluster the cells obtained by these gene selection methods. We found that the gene selection performance of RFCell was better than other gene selection methods.


Author(s):  
Soumya Raychaudhuri

The most interesting and challenging gene expression data sets to analyze are large multidimensional data sets that contain expression values for many genes across multiple conditions. In these data sets the use of scientific text can be particularly useful, since there are a myriad of genes examined under vastly different conditions, each of which may induce or repress expression of the same gene for different reasons. There is an enormous complexity to the data that we are examining—each gene is associated with dozens if not hundreds of expression values as well as multiple documents built up from vocabularies consisting of thousands of words. In Section 2.4 we reviewed common gene expression strategies, most of which revolve around defining groups of genes based on common profiles. A limitation of many gene expression analytic approaches is that they do not incorporate comprehensive background knowledge about the genes into the analysis. We present computational methods that leverage the peer-reviewed literature in the automatic analysis of gene expression data sets. Including the literature in gene expression data analysis offers an opportunity to incorporate background functional information about the genes when defining expression clusters. In Chapter 5 we saw how literature- based approaches could help in the analysis of single condition experiments. Here we will apply the strategies introduced in Chapter 6 to assess the coherence of groups of genes to enhance gene expression analysis approaches. The methods proposed here could, in fact, be applied to any multivariate genomics data type. The key concepts discussed in this chapter are listed in the frame box. We begin with a discussion of gene groups and their role in expression analysis; we briefly discuss strategies to assign keywords to groups and strategies to assess their functional coherence. We apply functional coherence measures to gene expression analysis; for examples we focus on a yeast expression data set. We first demonstrate how functional coherence can be used to focus in on the key biologically relevant gene groups derived by clustering methods such as self-organizing maps and k-means clustering.


2019 ◽  
Vol 2019 ◽  
pp. 1-12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Suyan Tian ◽  
Chi Wang ◽  
Bing Wang

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.


2013 ◽  
Vol 11 (03) ◽  
pp. 1341006
Author(s):  
QIANG LOU ◽  
ZORAN OBRADOVIC

In order to more accurately predict an individual's health status, in clinical applications it is often important to perform analysis of high-dimensional gene expression data that varies with time. A major challenge in predicting from such temporal microarray data is that the number of biomarkers used as features is typically much larger than the number of labeled subjects. One way to address this challenge is to perform feature selection as a preprocessing step and then apply a classification method on selected features. However, traditional feature selection methods cannot handle multivariate temporal data without applying techniques that flatten temporal data into a single matrix in advance. In this study, a feature selection filter that can directly select informative features from temporal gene expression data is proposed. In our approach, we measure the distance between multivariate temporal data from two subjects. Based on this distance, we define the objective function of temporal margin based feature selection to maximize each subject's temporal margin in its own relevant subspace. The experimental results on synthetic and two real flu data sets provide evidence that our method outperforms the alternatives, which flatten the temporal data in advance.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bobby Ranjan ◽  
Wenjie Sun ◽  
Jinyu Park ◽  
Ronald Xie ◽  
Fatemeh Alipour ◽  
...  

Feature selection (marker gene selection) is widely believed to improve clustering accuracy, and is thus a key component of single cell clustering pipelines. However, we found that the performance of existing feature selection methods was inconsistent across benchmark datasets, and occasionally even worse than without feature selection. Moreover, existing methods ignored information contained in gene-gene correlations. We there-fore developed DUBStepR (Determining the Underlying Basis using Stepwise Regression), a feature selection algorithm that leverages gene-gene correlations with a novel measure of inhomogeneity in feature space, termed the Density Index (DI). Despite selecting a relatively small number of genes, DUB-StepR substantially outperformed existing single-cell feature selection methods across diverse clustering benchmarks. In a published scRNA-seq dataset from sorted monocytes, DUBStepR sensitively detected a rare and previously invisible population of contaminating basophils. DUBStepR is scalable to large datasets, and can be straightforwardly applied to other data types such as single-cell ATAC-seq. We propose DUBStepR as a general-purpose feature selection solution for accurately clustering single-cell data.


Author(s):  
Wei Zheng ◽  
Xiaofeng Zhu ◽  
Yonghua Zhu ◽  
Shichao Zhang

Feature selection is an indispensable preprocessing procedure for high-dimensional data analysis,but previous feature selection methods usually ignore sample diversity (i.e., every sample has individual contribution for the model construction) andhave limited ability to deal with incomplete datasets where a part of training samples have unobserved data. To address these issues, in this paper, we firstly propose a robust feature selectionframework to relieve the influence of outliers, andthen introduce an indicator matrix to avoid unobserved data to take participation in numerical computation of feature selection so that both our proposed feature selection framework and exiting feature selection frameworks are available to conductfeature selection on incomplete data sets. We further propose a new optimization algorithm to optimize the resulting objective function as well asprove our algorithm to converge fast. Experimental results on both real and artificial incompletedata sets demonstrated that our proposed methodoutperformed the feature selection methods undercomparison in terms of clustering performance.  


2018 ◽  
Vol 35 (16) ◽  
pp. 2865-2867 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tallulah S Andrews ◽  
Martin Hemberg

Abstract Motivation Most genomes contain thousands of genes, but for most functional responses, only a subset of those genes are relevant. To facilitate many single-cell RNASeq (scRNASeq) analyses the set of genes is often reduced through feature selection, i.e. by removing genes only subject to technical noise. Results We present M3Drop, an R package that implements popular existing feature selection methods and two novel methods which take advantage of the prevalence of zeros (dropouts) in scRNASeq data to identify features. We show these new methods outperform existing methods on simulated and real datasets. Availability and implementation M3Drop is freely available on github as an R package and is compatible with other popular scRNASeq tools: https://github.com/tallulandrews/M3Drop. Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.


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