Tumor-specific gene expression patterns with gene expression profiles

Gene expression profiles of 14 common tumors and their counterpart normal tissues were analyzed with machine learning methods to address the problem of selection of tumor-specific genes and analysis of their differential expressions in tumor tissues. First, a variation of the Relief algorithm, "RFE_Relief algorithm" was proposed to learn the relations between genes and tissue types. Then, a support vector machine was employed to find the gene subset with the best classification performance for distinguishing cancerous tissues and their counterparts. After tissue-specific genes were removed, cross validation experiments were employed to demonstrate the common deregulated expressions of the selected gene in tumor tissues. The results indicate the existence of a specific expression fingerprint of these genes that is shared in different tumor tissues, and the hallmarks of the expression patterns of these genes in cancerous tissues are summarized at the end of this paper.