Automatically inferred Markov network models for classification of chromosomal band pattern structures

A structural pattern recognition approach to the analysis and classification of metaphase chromosome band patterns is presented. An operational method of representing band pattern profiles as sharp edged idealized profiles is outlined. These profiles are nonlinearly scaled to a few, but fixed number of "density" levels. Previous experience has shown that profiles of six levels are appropriate and that the differences between successive bands in these profiles are suitable for classification. String representations, which focuses on the sequences of transitions between local band pattern levels, are derived from such "difference profiles." A method of syntactic analysis of the band transition sequences by dynamic programming for optimal (maximal probability) string-to-network alignments is described. It develops automatic data-driven inference of band pattern models (Markov networks) per class, and uses these models for classification. The method does not use centromere information, but assumes the p-q-orientation of the band pattern profiles to be known a priori. It is experimentally established that the method can build Markov network models, which, when used for classification, show a recognition rate of about 92% on test data. The experiments used 200 samples (chromosome profiles) for each of the 22 autosome chromosome types and are designed to also investigate various classifier design problems. It is found that the use of a priori knowledge of Denver Group assignment only improved classification by 1 or 2%. A scheme for typewise normalization of the class relationship measures prove useful, partly through improvements on average results and partly through a more evenly distributed error pattern. The choice of reference of the p-q-orientation of the band patterns is found to be unimportant, and results of timing of the execution time of the analysis show that recent and efficient implementations can process one cell in less than 1 min on current standard hardware. A measure of divergence between data sets and Markov network models is shown to provide usable estimates of experimental classification performance.