Genetic Bee Colony (GBC) algorithm: A new gene selection method for microarray cancer classification

Naturally inspired evolutionary algorithms prove effectiveness when used for solving feature selection and classification problems. Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) is a relatively new swarm intelligence method. In this paper, we propose a new hybrid gene selection method, namely Genetic Bee Colony (GBC) algorithm. The proposed algorithm combines the used of a Genetic Algorithm (GA) along with Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) algorithm. The goal is to integrate the advantages of both algorithms. The proposed algorithm is applied to a microarray gene expression profile in order to select the most predictive and informative genes for cancer classification. In order to test the accuracy performance of the proposed algorithm, extensive experiments were conducted. Three binary microarray datasets are use, which include: colon, leukemia, and lung. In addition, another three multi-class microarray datasets are used, which are: SRBCT, lymphoma, and leukemia. Results of the GBC algorithm are compared with our recently proposed technique: mRMR when combined with the Artificial Bee Colony algorithm (mRMR-ABC). We also compared the combination of mRMR with GA (mRMR-GA) and Particle Swarm Optimization (mRMR-PSO) algorithms. In addition, we compared the GBC algorithm with other related algorithms that have been recently published in the literature, using all benchmark datasets. The GBC algorithm shows superior performance as it achieved the highest classification accuracy along with the lowest average number of selected genes. This proves that the GBC algorithm is a promising approach for solving the gene selection problem in both binary and multi-class cancer classification.     

A machine learning approach to select features important to stroke prognosis

Ischemic stroke is a common neurological disorder, and is still the principal cause of serious long-term disability in the world. Selection of features related to stroke prognosis is highly valuable for effective intervention and treatment. In this study, an integrated machine learning approach was used to select the features as prognosis factors of stroke on The International Stroke Trial (IST) dataset. We considered the common problems of feature selection and prediction in medical datasets. Firstly, the importance of features was ranked by the Shapiro-Wilk algorithm and the Pearson correlations between features were analyzed. Then, we used Recursive Feature Elimination with Cross-Validation (RFECV), which incorporated linear SVC, Random-Forest-Classifier, Extra-Trees-Classifier, AdaBoost-Classifier, and Multinomial-Naïve-Bayes-Classifier as estimator respectively, to select robust features. Furthermore, the importance of selected features was determined by Random-Forest-Classifier and Shapiro-Wilk algorithm. Finally, twenty-three selected features were used by SVC, MLP, Random-Forest, and AdaBoost-Classifier to predict the RVISINF (Infarct visible on CT) of acute stroke on IST dataset. It was suggested that the selected features could be used to infer the long-term prognosis of acute stroke at a high accuracy, and it also could be used to extract factors related to RVISINF, which is associated with large artery occlusion (LAO) in ischemic stroke patient.     

A class imbalance-aware Relief algorithm for the classification of tumors using microarray gene expression data

DNA microarray data has been widely used in cancer research due to the significant advantage helped to successfully distinguish between tumor classes. However, typical gene expression data usually presents a high-dimensional imbalanced characteristic, which poses severe challenge for traditional machine learning methods to construct a robust classifier performing well on both the minority and majority classes. As one of the most successful feature weighting techniques, Relief is considered to particularly suit to handle high-dimensional problems. Unfortunately, almost all relief-based methods have not taken the class imbalance distribution into account. This study identifies that existing Relief-based algorithms may underestimate the features with the discernibility ability of minority classes, and ignore the distribution characteristic of minority class samples. As a result, an additional bias towards being classified into the majority classes can be introduced. To this end, a new method, named imRelief, is proposed for efficiently handling high-dimensional imbalanced gene expression data. imRelief can correct the bias towards to the majority classes, and consider the scattered distributional characteristic of minority class samples in the process of estimating feature weights. This way, imRelief has the ability to reward the features which perform well at separating the minority classes from other classes. Experiments on four microarray gene expression data sets demonstrate the effectiveness of imRelief in both feature weighting and feature subset selection applications.     

Variable selection using probability density function similarity for support vector machine classification of high-dimensional microarray data

One problem with discriminant analysis of microarray data is representation of each sample by a large number of genes that are possibly irrelevant, insignificant or redundant. Methods of variable selection are, therefore, of great significance in microarray data analysis. To circumvent the problem, a new gene mining approach is proposed based on the similarity between probability density functions on each gene for the class of interest with respect to the others. This method allows the ascertainment of significant genes that are informative for discriminating each individual class rather than maximizing the separability of all classes. Then one can select genes containing important information about the particular subtypes of diseases. Based on the mined significant genes for individual classes, a support vector machine with local kernel transform is constructed for the classification of different diseases. The combination of the gene mining approach with support vector machine is demonstrated for cancer classification using two public data sets. The results reveal that significant genes are identified for each cancer, and the classification model shows satisfactory performance in training and prediction for both data sets.     

Exploiting scale-free information from expression data for cancer classification

Most studies concerning expression data analyses usually exploit information on the variability of gene intensity across samples. This information is sensitive to initial data processing, which affects the final conclusions. However expression data contains scale-free information, which is directly comparable between different samples. We propose to use the pairwise ratio of gene expression values rather than their absolute intensities for a classification of expression data. This information is stable to data processing and thus more attractive for classification analyses. In proposed schema of data analyses only information on relative gene expression levels in each sample is exploited. Testing on publicly available datasets leads to superior classification results.     

A novel approach for dimension reduction of microarray

This paper proposes a new hybrid search technique for feature (gene) selection (FS) using Independent component analysis (ICA) and Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) called ICA + ABC, to select informative genes based on a Naïve Bayes (NB) algorithm. An important trait of this technique is the optimization of ICA feature vector using ABC. ICA + ABC is a hybrid search algorithm that combines the benefits of extraction approach, to reduce the size of data and wrapper approach, to optimize the reduced feature vectors. This hybrid search technique is facilitated by evaluating the performance of ICA + ABC on six standard gene expression datasets of classification. Extensive experiments were conducted to compare the performance of ICA + ABC with the results obtained from recently published Minimum Redundancy Maximum Relevance (mRMR) +ABC algorithm for NB classifier. Also to check the performance that how ICA + ABC works as feature selection with NB classifier, compared the combination of ICA with popular filter techniques and with other similar bio inspired algorithm such as Genetic Algorithm (GA) and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO). The result shows that ICA + ABC has a significant ability to generate small subsets of genes from the ICA feature vector, that significantly improve the classification accuracy of NB classifier compared to other previously suggested methods.     

Improved binary PSO for feature selection using gene expression data

Gene expression profiles, which represent the state of a cell at a molecular level, have great potential as a medical diagnosis tool. Compared to the number of genes involved, available training data sets generally have a fairly small sample size in cancer type classification. These training data limitations constitute a challenge to certain classification methodologies. A reliable selection method for genes relevant for sample classification is needed in order to speed up the processing rate, decrease the predictive error rate, and to avoid incomprehensibility due to the large number of genes investigated. Improved binary particle swarm optimization (IBPSO) is used in this study to implement feature selection, and the K-nearest neighbor (K-NN) method serves as an evaluator of the IBPSO for gene expression data classification problems. Experimental results show that this method effectively simplifies feature selection and reduces the total number of features needed. The classification accuracy obtained by the proposed method has the highest classification accuracy in nine of the 11 gene expression data test problems, and is comparative to the classification accuracy of the two other test problems, as compared to the best results previously published.     

diSBPred: A machine learning based approach for disulfide bond prediction

The protein disulfide bond is a covalent bond that forms during post-translational modification by the oxidation of a pair of cysteines. In protein, the disulfide bond is the most frequent covalent link between amino acids after the peptide bond. It plays a significant role in three-dimensional (3D) ab initio protein structure prediction (aiPSP), stabilizing protein conformation, post-translational modification, and protein folding. In aiPSP, the location of disulfide bonds can strongly reduce the conformational space searching by imposing geometrical constraints. Existing experimental techniques for the determination of disulfide bonds are time-consuming and expensive. Thus, developing sequence-based computational methods for disulfide bond prediction becomes indispensable. This study proposed a stacking-based machine learning approach for disulfide bond prediction (diSBPred). Various useful sequence and structure-based features are extracted for effective training, including conservation profile, residue solvent accessibility, torsion angle flexibility, disorder probability, a sequential distance between cysteines, and more. The prediction of disulfide bonds is carried out in two stages: first, individual cysteines are predicted as either bonding or non-bonding; second, the cysteine-pairs are predicted as either bonding or non-bonding by including the results from cysteine bonding prediction as a feature.The examination of the relevance of the features employed in this study and the features utilized in the existing nearest neighbor algorithm (NNA) method shows that the features used in this study improve about 7.39 % in jackknife validation balanced accuracy. Moreover, for individual cysteine bonding prediction and cysteine-pair bonding prediction, diSBPred provides a 10-fold cross-validation balanced accuracy of 82.29 % and 94.20 %, respectively. Altogether, our predictor achieves an improvement of 43.25 % based on balanced accuracy compared to the existing NNA based approach. Thus, diSBPred can be utilized to annotate the cysteine bonding residues of protein sequences whose structures are unknown as well as improve the accuracy of the aiPSP method, which can further aid in experimental studies of the disulfide bond and structure determination.     

Protein secondary structure prediction using neural networks and deep learning: A review

Literature contains over fifty years of accumulated methods proposed by researchers for predicting the secondary structures of proteins in silico. A large part of this collection is comprised of artificial neural network-based approaches, a field of artificial intelligence and machine learning that is gaining increasing popularity in various application areas. The primary objective of this paper is to put together the summary of works that are important but sparse in time, to help new researchers have a clear view of the domain in a single place. An informative introduction to protein secondary structure and artificial neural networks is also included for context. This review will be valuable in designing future methods to improve protein secondary structure prediction accuracy. The various neural network methods found in this problem domain employ varying architectures and feature spaces, and a handful stand out due to significant improvements in prediction. Neural networks with larger feature scope and higher architecture complexity have been found to produce better protein secondary structure prediction. The current prediction accuracy lies around the 84% marks, leaving much room for further improvement in the prediction of secondary structures in silico. It was found that the estimated limit of 88% prediction accuracy has not been reached yet, hence further research is a timely demand.     

Enzyme classification using multiclass support vector machine and feature subset selection

Proteins are the macromolecules responsible for almost all biological processes in a cell. With the availability of large number of protein sequences from different sequencing projects, the challenge with the scientist is to characterize their functions. As the wet lab methods are time consuming and expensive, many computational methods such as FASTA, PSI-BLAST, DNA microarray clustering, and Nearest Neighborhood classification on protein–protein interaction network have been proposed. Support vector machine is one such method that has been used successfully for several problems such as protein fold recognition, protein structure prediction etc. Cai et al. in 2003 have used SVM for classifying proteins into different functional classes and to predict their function. They used the physico-chemical properties of proteins to represent the protein sequences. In this paper a model comprising of feature subset selection followed by multiclass Support Vector Machine is proposed to determine the functional class of a newly generated protein sequence. To train and test the model for its performance, 32 physico-chemical properties of enzymes from 6 enzyme classes are considered. To determine the features that contribute significantly for functional classification, Sequential Forward Floating Selection (SFFS), Orthogonal Forward Selection (OFS), and SVM Recursive Feature Elimination (SVM-RFE) algorithms are used and it is observed that out of 32 properties considered initially, only 20 features are sufficient to classify the proteins into its functional classes with an accuracy ranging from 91% to 94%. On comparison it is seen that, OFS followed by SVM performs better than other methods. Our model generalizes the existing model to include multiclass classification and to identify most significant features affecting the protein function.     

Identifying microRNAs involved in cancer pathway using support vector machines

Since Ambros’ discovery of small non-protein coding RNAs in the early 1990s, the past two decades have seen an upsurge in the number of reports of predicted microRNAs (miR), which have been implicated in various functions. The correlation of miRs with cancer has spurred the usage of this class of non-coding RNAs in various cancer therapies, although most of them are at trial stages. However, the experimental identification of a miR to be associated with cancer is still an elaborate, time-consuming process. To aid this process of miR association, we undertook an in-silico study involving the identification of global signatures in experimentally validated microRNAs associated with cancer. Subsequently, a support vector machine based two-step binary classifier system has been trained and modeled from the features extracted from the above study. A total of 60 distinguishing features were selected and ranked to form the feature set for classification – 26 of these extracted from the miR sequence itself, and the remainder from the thermodynamics of folding and the hybridized miRNA–mRNA structure. The two step classifier model – miRSEQ and miRINT had reasonably good performance measures with fairly high values of Matthew’s correlation coefficient (MCC) values ranging from 0.72 to 0.82 (availability: https://sites.google.com/site/sumitslab/tools).     

Data-driven machine learning models for quick prediction of thermal stability properties of OLED materials

Organic light-emitting diode (OLED) materials have exhibited a wide range of applications. However, the further development and commercialization of OLEDs requires higher quality OLED materials, including materials with a high thermal stability. Thermal stability is associated with the glass transition temperature (T_g) and decomposition temperature (T_d), but experimental determinations of these two important properties generally involve a time-consuming and laborious process. Thus, the development of a quick and accurate prediction tool is highly desirable. Motivated by the challenge, we explored machine learning (ML) by constructing a new dataset with more than 1,000 samples collected from a wide range of literature, through which ensemble learning models were explored. Models trained with the LightGBM algorithm exhibited the best prediction performance, where the values of mean absolute error, root mean squared error, and R² were 17.15 K, 24.63 K, and 0.77 for T_g prediction and 24.91 K, 33.88 K, and 0.78 for T_d prediction. The prediction performance and the generalization of the ML models were further tested by two applications, which also exhibited satisfactory results. Experimental validation further demonstrated the reliability and the practical potential of the ML-based models. In order to extend the practical application of the ML-based models, an online prediction platform was constructed. This platform includes the optimal prediction models and all the thermal stability data under study, and it is freely available at http://www.oledtppxmpugroup.com. We expect that this platform will become a useful tool for experimental investigation of T_g and T_d, accelerating the design of OLED materials with desired properties.     

Random frog: An efficient reversible jump Markov Chain Monte Carlo-like approach for variable selection with applications to gene selection and disease classification

The identification of disease-relevant genes represents a challenge in microarray-based disease diagnosis where the sample size is often limited. Among established methods, reversible jump Markov Chain Monte Carlo (RJMCMC) methods have proven to be quite promising for variable selection. However, the design and application of an RJMCMC algorithm requires, for example, special criteria for prior distributions. Also, the simulation from joint posterior distributions of models is computationally extensive, and may even be mathematically intractable. These disadvantages may limit the applications of RJMCMC algorithms. Therefore, the development of algorithms that possess the advantages of RJMCMC methods and are also efficient and easy to follow for selecting disease-associated genes is required. Here we report a RJMCMC-like method, called random frog that possesses the advantages of RJMCMC methods and is much easier to implement. Using the colon and the estrogen gene expression datasets, we show that random frog is effective in identifying discriminating genes. The top 2 ranked genes for colon and estrogen are Z50753, U00968, and Y10871_at, Z22536_at, respectively. (The source codes with GNU General Public License Version 2.0 are freely available to non-commercial users at: http://code.google.com/p/randomfrog/.)     

机器学习方法用于建立乙酰胆碱酯酶抑制剂的分类模型

我们构建了表征乙酰胆碱酯酶抑制剂分子组成、电荷、拓扑、几何结构及物理化学性质等特征的1559个描述符,通过Fischer Score排序过滤和Monte Carlo模拟退火法相结合进行变量筛选得到37个描述符,然后分别用支持向量学习机(SVM)、人工神经网络(ANN)和k-近邻(k-NN)等机器学习方法建立了乙酰胆碱酯酶抑制剂的分类预测模型.对于训练集的515个样本,通过五重交叉验证,各机器学习方法对正样本,负样本和总样本的平均预测精度分别为87.3%-92.7%,67.0%-81.0%和79.4%-88.2%;通过y-scrambling方法验证SVM模型是否偶然相关,结果正样本,负样本和总样本的平均预测精度分别为72.7%-82.5%,41.0%-53.0%和62.1%-69.1%,明显低于实际所建模型的预测精度,表明所建模型不存在偶然相关;对172个没有参与建模的外部独立测试样本,各机器学习方法对正样本,负样本和总样本的预测精度分别为93.3%-100.0%,74.6%-89.6%和86.1%-95.9%.所建模型中,SVM模型预测精度最好,且明显高于其它文献报道结果.     

A L1-regularized feature selection method for local dimension reduction on microarray data

Dimension reduction is a crucial technique in machine learning and data mining, which is widely used in areas of medicine, bioinformatics and genetics. In this paper, we propose a two-stage local dimension reduction approach for classification on microarray data. In first stage, a new L1-regularized feature selection method is defined to remove irrelevant and redundant features and to select the important features (biomarkers). In the next stage, PLS-based feature extraction is implemented on the selected features to extract synthesis features that best reflect discriminating characteristics for classification. The suitability of the proposal is demonstrated in an empirical study done with ten widely used microarray datasets, and the results show its effectiveness and competitiveness compared with four state-of-the-art methods. The experimental results on St Jude dataset shows that our method can be effectively applied to microarray data analysis for subtype prediction and the discovery of gene coexpression.     

Support vector inductive logic programming outperforms the naive Bayes classifier and inductive logic programming for the classification of bioactive chemical compounds

We investigate the classification performance of circular fingerprints in combination with the Naive Bayes Classifier (MP2D), Inductive Logic Programming (ILP) and Support Vector Inductive Logic Programming (SVILP) on a standard molecular benchmark dataset comprising 11 activity classes and about 102,000 structures. The Naive Bayes Classifier treats features independently while ILP combines structural fragments, and then creates new features with higher predictive power. SVILP is a very recently presented method which adds a support vector machine after common ILP procedures. The performance of the methods is evaluated via a number of statistical measures, namely recall, specificity, precision, F-measure, Matthews Correlation Coefficient, area under the Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve and enrichment factor (EF). According to the F-measure, which takes both recall and precision into account, SVILP is for seven out of the 11 classes the superior method. The results show that the Bayes Classifier gives the best recall performance for eight of the 11 targets, but has a much lower precision, specificity and F-measure. The SVILP model on the other hand has the highest recall for only three of the 11 classes, but generally far superior specificity and precision. To evaluate the statistical significance of the SVILP superiority, we employ McNemar's test which shows that SVILP performs significantly (p < 5%) better than both other methods for six out of 11 activity classes, while being superior with less significance for three of the remaining classes. While previously the Bayes Classifier was shown to perform very well in molecular classification studies, these results suggest that SVILP is able to extract additional knowledge from the data, thus improving classification results further.     

In silico screening of ssDNA aptamer against Escherichia coli O157:H7: A machine learning and the Pseudo K-tuple nucleotide composition based approach

This study was planned to in silico screening of ssDNA aptamer against Escherichia coli O157:H7 by combination of machine learning and the PseKNC approach. For this, firstly a total numbers of 47 validated ssDNA aptamers as well as 498 random DNA sequences were considered as positive and negative training data respectively. The sequences then converted to numerical vectors using PseKNC method through Pse-in-one 2.0 web server. After that, the numerical vectors were subjected to classification by the SVM, ANN and RF algorithms available in Orange 3.2.0 software. The performances of the tested models were evaluated using cross-validation, random sampling and ROC curve analyzes. The primary results demonstrated that the ANN and RF algorithms have appropriate performances for the data classification. To improve the performances of mentioned classifiers the positive training data was triplicated and re-training process was also performed. The results confirmed that data size improvement had significant effect on the accuracy of data classification especially about RF model. Subsequently, the RF algorithm with accuracy of 98% was selected for aptamer screening. The thermodynamics details of folding process as well as secondary structures of the screened aptamers were also considered as final evaluations. The results confirmed that the selected aptamers by the proposed method had appropriate structure properties and there is no thermodynamics limit for the aptamers folding.     

A deep learning approach based on convolutional LSTM for detecting diabetes

Diabetes is a chronic disease that occurs when the pancreas does not generate sufficient insulin or the body cannot effectively utilize the produced insulin. If it remains unidentified and untreated, then it could be very deadliest. One can lead a healthy life with proper treatment if the presence of diabetes can be detected at an early stage. When the conventional process of detecting diabetes is tedious, there is a need of an automated system for identifying diabetes from the clinical and physical data. In this study, we developed a novel diabetes classifying model based on Convolutional Long Short-term Memory (Conv-LSTM) that was not applied yet in this regard. We applied another three popular models such as Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), Traditional LSTM (T-LSTM), and CNN-LSTM and compared the performance with our developed model over the Pima Indians Diabetes Database (PIDD). Significant features were extracted from the dataset using Boruta algorithm that returned glucose, BMI, insulin, blood pressure, and age as important features for classifying diabetes patients more accurately. We performed hyperparameter optimization using Grid Search algorithm in order to find the optimal parameters for the applied models. Initial experiment by splitting the dataset into separate training and testing sets, the Conv-LSTM-based model classified the diabetes patients with the highest accuracy of 91.38 %. In later, using cross-validation technique the Conv-LSTM model achieved the highest accuracy of 97.26 % and outperformed the other three models along with the state-of-the-art models.