Molecular cancer classification using an meta-sample-based regularized robust coding method

Motivation Previous studies have demonstrated that machine learning based molecular cancer classification using gene expression profiling (GEP) data is promising for the clinic diagnosis and treatment of cancer. Novel classification methods with high efficiency and prediction accuracy are still needed to deal with high dimensionality and small sample size of typical GEP data. Recently the sparse representation (SR) method has been successfully applied to the cancer classification. Nevertheless, its efficiency needs to be improved when analyzing large-scale GEP data. Results In this paper we present the meta-sample-based regularized robust coding classification (MRRCC), a novel effective cancer classification technique that combines the idea of meta-sample-based cluster method with regularized robust coding (RRC) method. It assumes that the coding residual and the coding coefficient are respectively independent and identically distributed. Similar to meta-sample-based SR classification (MSRC), MRRCC extracts a set of meta-samples from the training samples, and then encodes a testing sample as the sparse linear combination of these meta-samples. The representation fidelity is measured by the l2-norm or l1-norm of the coding residual. Conclusions Extensive experiments on publicly available GEP datasets demonstrate that the proposed method is more efficient while its prediction accuracy is equivalent to existing MSRC-based methods and better than other state-of-the-art dimension reduction based methods.This article was funded by the National Science Foundation of China on finding tumor-related driver pathway with comprehensive analysis method based on next-generation sequencing data and the dimension reduction of gene expression data based on heuristic method (grant nos. 61474267, 60973153 and 61133010) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Grant P01 AG12993 (PI: E. Michaelis). This article has been published as part of BMC Bioinformatics Volume 15 Supplement 15, 2014: Proceedings of the 2013 International Conference on Intelligent Computing (ICIC 2013). The full contents of the supplement are available online at http://www.biomedcentral.com/bmcbioinformatics/supplements/15/S15