Erika Cantor, Sandra Guauque-Olarte, Roberto León, Steren Chabert, Rodrigo Salas
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引用次数: 0
Abstract
The use of prior knowledge in the machine learning framework has been considered a potential tool to handle the curse of dimensionality in genetic and genomics data. Although random forest (RF) represents a flexible non-parametric approach with several advantages, it can provide poor accuracy in high-dimensional settings, mainly in scenarios with small sample sizes. We propose a knowledge-slanted RF that integrates biological networks as prior knowledge into the model to improve its performance and explainability, exemplifying its use for selecting and identifying relevant genes. knowledge-slanted RF is a combination of two stages. First, prior knowledge represented by graphs is translated by running a random walk with restart algorithm to determine the relevance of each gene based on its connection and localization on a protein-protein interaction network. Then, each relevance is used to modify the selection probability to draw a gene as a candidate split-feature in the conventional RF. Experiments in simulated datasets with very small sample sizes $$(n \le 30)$$ comparing knowledge-slanted RF against conventional RF and logistic lasso regression, suggest an improved precision in outcome prediction compared to the other methods. The knowledge-slanted RF was completed with the introduction of a modified version of the Boruta feature selection algorithm. Finally, knowledge-slanted RF identified more relevant biological genes, offering a higher level of explainability for users than conventional RF. These findings were corroborated in one real case to identify relevant genes to calcific aortic valve stenosis.
期刊介绍:
BioData Mining is an open access, open peer-reviewed journal encompassing research on all aspects of data mining applied to high-dimensional biological and biomedical data, focusing on computational aspects of knowledge discovery from large-scale genetic, transcriptomic, genomic, proteomic, and metabolomic data.
Topical areas include, but are not limited to:
-Development, evaluation, and application of novel data mining and machine learning algorithms.
-Adaptation, evaluation, and application of traditional data mining and machine learning algorithms.
-Open-source software for the application of data mining and machine learning algorithms.
-Design, development and integration of databases, software and web services for the storage, management, retrieval, and analysis of data from large scale studies.
-Pre-processing, post-processing, modeling, and interpretation of data mining and machine learning results for biological interpretation and knowledge discovery.