Identifying Genes to Predict Cancer Radiotherapy-Related Fatigue with Machine-Learning Methods

Abstract

While many factors influence the fatigue experienced by patients undergoing radiation therapy (RT), we hypothesize that expression of genes related to oxidative stress can be predictive of RT-related fatigue. In this work, we present a two-phase scheme which first selects a limited subset of genes deemed most predictive by a regularized elastic net, followed by a widely used classifier, the regularized random forest, to discriminate patients having high fatigue from low fatigue during RT. The model predicted 80% accuracy (0.80 AUC) in cross-validation. Initial results suggest that several genes are consistently selected in the proposed scheme, such as PRDX5, FHL2 and GPX4, showing promise as potential predictors for RT-related fatigue, and may provide information of its biologic underpinnings.