514 research outputs found
Gene Expression based Survival Prediction for Cancer Patients: A Topic Modeling Approach
Cancer is one of the leading cause of death, worldwide. Many believe that
genomic data will enable us to better predict the survival time of these
patients, which will lead to better, more personalized treatment options and
patient care. As standard survival prediction models have a hard time coping
with the high-dimensionality of such gene expression (GE) data, many projects
use some dimensionality reduction techniques to overcome this hurdle. We
introduce a novel methodology, inspired by topic modeling from the natural
language domain, to derive expressive features from the high-dimensional GE
data. There, a document is represented as a mixture over a relatively small
number of topics, where each topic corresponds to a distribution over the
words; here, to accommodate the heterogeneity of a patient's cancer, we
represent each patient (~document) as a mixture over cancer-topics, where each
cancer-topic is a mixture over GE values (~words). This required some
extensions to the standard LDA model eg: to accommodate the "real-valued"
expression values - leading to our novel "discretized" Latent Dirichlet
Allocation (dLDA) procedure. We initially focus on the METABRIC dataset, which
describes breast cancer patients using the r=49,576 GE values, from
microarrays. Our results show that our approach provides survival estimates
that are more accurate than standard models, in terms of the standard
Concordance measure. We then validate this approach by running it on the
Pan-kidney (KIPAN) dataset, over r=15,529 GE values - here using the mRNAseq
modality - and find that it again achieves excellent results. In both cases, we
also show that the resulting model is calibrated, using the recent
"D-calibrated" measure. These successes, in two different cancer types and
expression modalities, demonstrates the generality, and the effectiveness, of
this approach
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