Abstract
One main challenge in modern medicine is the discovery of molecular disease subtypes characterized by relevant clinical differences, such as survival. However, clustering high-dimensional expression data is challenging due to noise and the curse of high-dimensionality. This article describes a disease subtyping pipeline that is able to exploit the important information available in pathway databases and clinical variables. The pipeline consists of a new feature selection procedure and existing clustering methods. Our procedure partitions a set of patients using the set of genes in each pathway as clustering features. To select the best features, this procedure estimates the relevance of each pathway and fuses relevant pathways. We show that our pipeline finds subtypes of patients with more distinctive survival profiles than traditional subtyping methods by analyzing a TCGA colon cancer gene expression dataset. Here we demonstrate that our pipeline improves three different clustering methods: k-means, SNF, and hierarchical clustering.
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Acknowledgments
This study used data generated by the TCGA Research Network; we thank donors and research groups for sharing these valuable data. This research was supported in part by the following grants: NIH R01 DK089167, R42 GM087013 and NSF DBI-0965741, and by the Robert J. Sokol Endowment in Systems Biology. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of any of the funding agencies.
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Diaz, D., Nguyen, T., Draghici, S. (2016). A Systems Biology Approach for Unsupervised Clustering of High-Dimensional Data. In: Pardalos, P., Conca, P., Giuffrida, G., Nicosia, G. (eds) Machine Learning, Optimization, and Big Data. MOD 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10122. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51469-7_16
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