Gene Identification for Small Cell Lung Cancer via Combining Affinity Propagation Clustering and Conditional Mutual Information

Small cell lung cancer (SCLC) accounts for a small proportion of lung cancer types, but its mortality rate is the highest owing to the rapidly early development. Identifying the key genes of SCLC will be of great significance for targeted therapy. In this paper, a new gene identification method is proposed by combining affinity propagation (AP) clustering and conditional mutual information (CMI). AP clustering is firstly presented to divide genes of SCLC into 49 groups. Then gene significance in each group is evaluated by CMI. Eight genes with highest significance in corresponding groups and four exemplars whose significance is larger than two-thirds of the maximum significance index are identified as key genes of SCLC after literature search in NCBI database.