A framework to identify physiological responses in microarray-based gene expression studies: selection and interpretation of biologically relevant genes

2008 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 78-90 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wendy Rodenburg ◽  
A. Geert Heidema ◽  
Jolanda M. A. Boer ◽  
Ingeborg M. J. Bovee-Oudenhoven ◽  
Edith J. M. Feskens ◽  
...  

In whole genome microarray studies major gene expression changes are easily identified, but it is a challenge to capture small, but biologically important, changes. Pathway-based programs can capture small effects but may have the disadvantage of being restricted to functionally annotated genes. A structured approach toward the identification of major and small changes for interpretation of biological effects is needed. We present a structured approach, a framework, that addresses different considerations in 1) the identification of informative genes in microarray data sets and 2) the interpretation of their biological relevance. The steps of this framework include gene ranking, gene selection, gene grouping, and biological interpretation. Random forests (RF), which takes gene-gene interactions into account, is examined to rank and select genes. For human, mouse, and rat whole genome arrays, less than half of the probes on the array are annotated. Consequently, pathway analysis tools ignore half of the information present in the microarray data set. The framework described takes all genes into account. RF is a useful tool to rank genes by taking interactions into account. Applying a permutation approach, we were able to define an objective threshold for gene selection. RF combined with self-organizing maps identified genes with coordinated but small gene expression responses that were not fully annotated but corresponded to the same biological process. The presented approach provides a flexible framework for biological interpretation of microarray data sets. It includes all genes in the data set, takes gene-gene interactions into account, and provides an objective threshold for gene selection.

2019 ◽  
Vol 56 (2) ◽  
pp. 117-138
Author(s):  
Małgorzata Ćwiklińska-Jurkowska

SummaryThe usefulness of combining methods is examined using the example of microarray cancer data sets, where expression levels of huge numbers of genes are reported. Problems of discrimination into two groups are examined on three data sets relating to the expression of huge numbers of genes. For the three examined microarray data sets, the cross-validation errors evaluated on the remaining half of the whole data set, not used earlier for the selection of genes, were used as measures of classifier performance. Common single procedures for the selection of genes—Prediction Analysis of Microarrays (PAM) and Significance Analysis of Microarrays (SAM)—were compared with the fusion of eight selection procedures, or of a smaller subset of five of them, excluding SAM or PAM. Merging five or eight selection methods gave similar results. Based on the misclassification rates for the three examined microarray data sets, for any examined ensemble of classifiers, the combining of gene selection methods was not superior to single PAM or SAM selection for two of the examined data sets. Additionally, the procedure of heterogeneous combining of five base classifiers—k-nearest neighbors, SVM linear and SVM radial with parameter c=1, shrunken centroids regularized classifier (SCRDA) and nearest mean classifier—proved to significantly outperform resampling classifiers such as bagging decision trees. Heterogeneously combined classifiers also outperformed double bagging for some ranges of gene numbers and data sets, but merging is generally not superior to random forests. The preliminary step of combining gene rankings was generally not essential for the performance for either heterogeneously or homogeneously combined classifiers.


2020 ◽  
Vol 21 (S13) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sudipta Acharya ◽  
Laizhong Cui ◽  
Yi Pan

Abstract Background In the field of computational biology, analyzing complex data helps to extract relevant biological information. Sample classification of gene expression data is one such popular bio-data analysis technique. However, the presence of a large number of irrelevant/redundant genes in expression data makes a sample classification algorithm working inefficiently. Feature selection is one such high-dimensionality reduction technique that helps to maximize the effectiveness of any sample classification algorithm. Recent advances in biotechnology have improved the biological data to include multi-modal or multiple views. Different ‘omics’ resources capture various equally important biological properties of entities. However, most of the existing feature selection methodologies are biased towards considering only one out of multiple biological resources. Consequently, some crucial aspects of available biological knowledge may get ignored, which could further improve feature selection efficiency. Results In this present work, we have proposed a Consensus Multi-View Multi-objective Clustering-based feature selection algorithm called CMVMC. Three controlled genomic and proteomic resources like gene expression, Gene Ontology (GO), and protein-protein interaction network (PPIN) are utilized to build two independent views. The concept of multi-objective consensus clustering has been applied within our proposed gene selection method to satisfy both incorporated views. Gene expression data sets of Multiple tissues and Yeast from two different organisms (Homo Sapiens and Saccharomyces cerevisiae, respectively) are chosen for experimental purposes. As the end-product of CMVMC, a reduced set of relevant and non-redundant genes are found for each chosen data set. These genes finally participate in an effective sample classification. Conclusions The experimental study on chosen data sets shows that our proposed feature-selection method improves the sample classification accuracy and reduces the gene-space up to a significant level. In the case of Multiple Tissues data set, CMVMC reduces the number of genes (features) from 5565 to 41, with 92.73% of sample classification accuracy. For Yeast data set, the number of genes got reduced to 10 from 2884, with 95.84% sample classification accuracy. Two internal cluster validity indices - Silhouette and Davies-Bouldin (DB) and one external validity index Classification Accuracy (CA) are chosen for comparative study. Reported results are further validated through well-known biological significance test and visualization tool.


2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Majid Mohammadi ◽  
Hossein Sharifi Noghabi ◽  
Ghosheh Abed Hodtani ◽  
Habib Rajabi Mashhadi

One of the central challenges in cancer research is identifying significant genes among thousands of others on a microarray. Since preventing outbreak and progression of cancer is the ultimate goal in bioinformatics and computational biology, detection of genes that are most involved is vital and crucial. In this article, we propose a Maximum-Minimum Correntropy Criterion (MMCC) approach for selection of biologically meaningful genes from microarray data sets which is stable, fast and robust against diverse noise and outliers and competitively accurate in comparison with other algorithms. Moreover, via an evolutionary optimization process, the optimal number of features for each data set is determined. Through broad experimental evaluation, MMCC is proved to be significantly better compared to other well-known gene selection algorithms for 25 commonly used microarray data sets. Surprisingly, high accuracy in classification by Support Vector Machine (SVM) is achieved by less than 10 genes selected by MMCC in all of the cases.


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.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kota Fujisawa ◽  
Mamoru Shimo ◽  
Y.-H. Taguchi ◽  
Shinya Ikematsu ◽  
Ryota Miyata

AbstractCoronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is raging worldwide. This potentially fatal infectious disease is caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). However, the complete mechanism of COVID-19 is not well understood. Therefore, we analyzed gene expression profiles of COVID-19 patients to identify disease-related genes through an innovative machine learning method that enables a data-driven strategy for gene selection from a data set with a small number of samples and many candidates. Principal-component-analysis-based unsupervised feature extraction (PCAUFE) was applied to the RNA expression profiles of 16 COVID-19 patients and 18 healthy control subjects. The results identified 123 genes as critical for COVID-19 progression from 60,683 candidate probes, including immune-related genes. The 123 genes were enriched in binding sites for transcription factors NFKB1 and RELA, which are involved in various biological phenomena such as immune response and cell survival: the primary mediator of canonical nuclear factor-kappa B (NF-κB) activity is the heterodimer RelA-p50. The genes were also enriched in histone modification H3K36me3, and they largely overlapped the target genes of NFKB1 and RELA. We found that the overlapping genes were downregulated in COVID-19 patients. These results suggest that canonical NF-κB activity was suppressed by H3K36me3 in COVID-19 patient blood.


BMC Genomics ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Da Xu ◽  
Jialin Zhang ◽  
Hanxiao Xu ◽  
Yusen Zhang ◽  
Wei Chen ◽  
...  

Abstract Background The small number of samples and the curse of dimensionality hamper the better application of deep learning techniques for disease classification. Additionally, the performance of clustering-based feature selection algorithms is still far from being satisfactory due to their limitation in using unsupervised learning methods. To enhance interpretability and overcome this problem, we developed a novel feature selection algorithm. In the meantime, complex genomic data brought great challenges for the identification of biomarkers and therapeutic targets. The current some feature selection methods have the problem of low sensitivity and specificity in this field. Results In this article, we designed a multi-scale clustering-based feature selection algorithm named MCBFS which simultaneously performs feature selection and model learning for genomic data analysis. The experimental results demonstrated that MCBFS is robust and effective by comparing it with seven benchmark and six state-of-the-art supervised methods on eight data sets. The visualization results and the statistical test showed that MCBFS can capture the informative genes and improve the interpretability and visualization of tumor gene expression and single-cell sequencing data. Additionally, we developed a general framework named McbfsNW using gene expression data and protein interaction data to identify robust biomarkers and therapeutic targets for diagnosis and therapy of diseases. The framework incorporates the MCBFS algorithm, network recognition ensemble algorithm and feature selection wrapper. McbfsNW has been applied to the lung adenocarcinoma (LUAD) data sets. The preliminary results demonstrated that higher prediction results can be attained by identified biomarkers on the independent LUAD data set, and we also structured a drug-target network which may be good for LUAD therapy. Conclusions The proposed novel feature selection method is robust and effective for gene selection, classification, and visualization. The framework McbfsNW is practical and helpful for the identification of biomarkers and targets on genomic data. It is believed that the same methods and principles are extensible and applicable to other different kinds of data sets.


2010 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. BII.S3846 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ying Chen ◽  
Rebekah Wu ◽  
James Felton ◽  
David M. Rocke ◽  
Anu Chakicherla

Motivation Whole genome microarrays are increasingly becoming the method of choice to study responses in model organisms to disease, stressors or other stimuli. However, whole genome sequences are available for only some model organisms, and there are still many species whose genome sequences are not yet available. Cross-species studies, where arrays developed for one species are used to study gene expression in a closely related species, have been used to address this gap, with some promising results. Current analytical methods have included filtration of some probes or genes that showed low hybridization activities. But consensus filtration schemes are still not available. Results A novel masking procedure is proposed based on currently available target species sequences to filter out probes and study a cross-species data set using this masking procedure and gene-set analysis. Gene-set analysis evaluates the association of some priori defined gene groups with a phenotype of interest. Two methods, Gene Set Enrichment Analysis (GSEA) and Test of Test Statistics (ToTS) were investigated. The results showed that masking procedure together with ToTS method worked well in our data set. The results from an alternative way to study cross-species hybridization experiments without masking are also presented. We hypothesize that the multi-probes structure of Affymetrix microarrays makes it possible to aggregate the effects of both well-hybridized and poorly-hybridized probes to study a group of genes. The principles of gene-set analysis were applied to the probe-level data instead of gene-level data. The results showed that ToTS can give valuable information and thus can be used as a powerful technique for analyzing cross-species hybridization experiments. Availability Software in the form of R code is available at http://anson.ucdavis.edu/~ychen/cross-species.html Supplementary Data Supplementary data are available at http://anson.ucdavis.edu/~ychen/cross-species.html


BMC Genomics ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kyu-Sang Lim ◽  
Qian Dong ◽  
Pamela Moll ◽  
Jana Vitkovska ◽  
Gregor Wiktorin ◽  
...  

Abstract Background Gene expression profiling in blood is a potential source of biomarkers to evaluate or predict phenotypic differences between pigs but is expensive and inefficient because of the high abundance of globin mRNA in porcine blood. These limitations can be overcome by the use of QuantSeq 3’mRNA sequencing (QuantSeq) combined with a method to deplete or block the processing of globin mRNA prior to or during library construction. Here, we validated the effectiveness of QuantSeq using a novel specific globin blocker (GB) that is included in the library preparation step of QuantSeq. Results In data set 1, four concentrations of the GB were applied to RNA samples from two pigs. The GB significantly reduced the proportion of globin reads compared to non-GB (NGB) samples (P = 0.005) and increased the number of detectable non-globin genes. The highest evaluated concentration (C1) of the GB resulted in the largest reduction of globin reads compared to the NGB (from 56.4 to 10.1%). The second highest concentration C2, which showed very similar globin depletion rates (12%) as C1 but a better correlation of the expression of non-globin genes between NGB and GB (r = 0.98), allowed the expression of an additional 1295 non-globin genes to be detected, although 40 genes that were detected in the NGB sample (at a low level) were not present in the GB library. Concentration C2 was applied in the rest of the study. In data set 2, the distribution of the percentage of globin reads for NGB (n = 184) and GB (n = 189) samples clearly showed the effects of the GB on reducing globin reads, in particular for HBB, similar to results from data set 1. Data set 3 (n = 84) revealed that the proportion of globin reads that remained in GB samples was significantly and positively correlated with the reticulocyte count in the original blood sample (P < 0.001). Conclusions The effect of the GB on reducing the proportion of globin reads in porcine blood QuantSeq was demonstrated in three data sets. In addition to increasing the efficiency of sequencing non-globin mRNA, the GB for QuantSeq has an advantage that it does not require an additional step prior to or during library creation. Therefore, the GB is a useful tool in the quantification of whole gene expression profiles in porcine blood.


2018 ◽  
Vol 17 ◽  
pp. 117693511877108 ◽  
Author(s):  
Min Wang ◽  
Steven M Kornblau ◽  
Kevin R Coombes

Principal component analysis (PCA) is one of the most common techniques in the analysis of biological data sets, but applying PCA raises 2 challenges. First, one must determine the number of significant principal components (PCs). Second, because each PC is a linear combination of genes, it rarely has a biological interpretation. Existing methods to determine the number of PCs are either subjective or computationally extensive. We review several methods and describe a new R package, PCDimension, that implements additional methods, the most important being an algorithm that extends and automates a graphical Bayesian method. Using simulations, we compared the methods. Our newly automated procedure is competitive with the best methods when considering both accuracy and speed and is the most accurate when the number of objects is small compared with the number of attributes. We applied the method to a proteomics data set from patients with acute myeloid leukemia. Proteins in the apoptosis pathway could be explained using 6 PCs. By clustering the proteins in PC space, we were able to replace the PCs by 6 “biological components,” 3 of which could be immediately interpreted from the current literature. We expect this approach combining PCA with clustering to be widely applicable.


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