Stable gene signature selection for prediction of breast cancer recurrence using joint mutual information

Abstract

In this experiment, a gene selection technique was proposed to select a robust gene signature from microarray data for prediction of breast cancer recurrence. In this regard, a hybrid scoring criterion was designed as linear combinations of the scores that were determined in the mutual information (MI) domain and protein-protein interactions network. Whereas, the MI-based score represents the complementary information between the selected genes for outcome prediction; and the number of connections in the PPI network between the selected genes builds the PPI-based score. All genes were scored by using the proposed function in a hybrid forward-backward gene-set selection process to select the optimum biomarker-set from the gene expression microarray data. The accuracy and stability of the finally selected biomarkers were evaluated by using five-fold cross-validation (CV) to classify available data on breast cancer patients into two cohorts of poor and good prognosis. The results showed an appealing improvement in the cross-dataset accuracy in comparison with similar studies whenever we applied a primary signature, which was selected from one dataset, to predict survival in other independent datasets. Moreover, the proposed method demonstrated 58-92 percent overlap between 50-genes signatures, which were selected from seven independent datasets individually.