Luca Cattelani, Arindam Ghosh, Teemu Rintala, Vittorio Fortino
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引用次数: 0
Abstract
Machine learning algorithms have been extensively used for accurate classification of cancer subtypes driven by gene expression-based biomarkers. However, biomarker models combining multiple gene expression signatures are often not reproducible in external validation datasets and their feature set size is often not optimized, jeopardizing their translatability into cost-effective clinical tools. We investigated how to solve the multi-objective problem of finding the best trade-offs between classification performance and set size applying seven algorithms for machine learning-driven feature subset selection and analyse how they perform in a benchmark with eight large-scale transcriptome datasets of cancer, covering both training and external validation sets. The benchmark includes evaluation metrics assessing the performance of the individual biomarkers and the solution sets, according to their accuracy, diversity, and stability of the composing genes. Moreover, a new evaluation metric for cross-validation studies is proposed that generalizes the hypervolume, which is commonly used to assess the performance of multi-objective optimization algorithms. Biomarkers exhibiting 0.8 of balanced accuracy on the external dataset for breast, kidney and ovarian cancer using respectively 4, 2 and 7 features, were obtained. Genetic algorithms often provided better performance than other considered algorithms, and the recently proposed NSGA2-CH and NSGA2-CHS were the best performing methods in most cases.
期刊介绍:
IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics emphasizes the algorithmic, mathematical, statistical and computational methods that are central in bioinformatics and computational biology; the development and testing of effective computer programs in bioinformatics; the development of biological databases; and important biological results that are obtained from the use of these methods, programs and databases; the emerging field of Systems Biology, where many forms of data are used to create a computer-based model of a complex biological system