Fusing Gene Interaction to Improve Disease Discrimination on Classification Analysis

It is usually observed that among genes there exist strong statistical interactions associated with diseases of public health importance. Gene interactions can potentially contribute to the improvement of disease classification accuracy. Especially when gene expression differs across different classes are not great enough, it is more important to take use of gene interactions for disease classification analyses. However, most gene selection algorithms in classification analyses merely focus on genes whose expression levels show differences across classes, and ignore the discriminatory information from gene interactions. In this study, we develop a two-stage algorithm that can take gene interaction into account during a gene selection procedure. Its biggest advantage is that it can take advantage of discriminatory information from gene interactions as well as gene expression differences, by using "Bayes error" as a gene selection criterion. Using simulated and real microarray data sets, we demonstrate the ability of gene interactions for classification accuracy improvement, and present that the proposed algorithm can yield small informative sets of genes while leading to highly accurate classification results. Thus our study may give a novel sight for future gene selection algorithms of human diseases discrimination.