title: A comparative study of discriminating human heart failure etiology using gene expression profiles.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Human heart failure is a complex disease that manifests from multiple genetic and environmental factors. Although ischemic and non-ischemic heart disease present clinically with many similar decreases in ventricular function, emerging work suggests that they are distinct diseases with different responses to therapy. The ability to distinguish between ischemic and non-ischemic heart failure may be essential to guide appropriate therapy and determine prognosis for successful treatment. In this paper we consider discriminating the etiologies of heart failure using gene expression libraries from two separate institutions.
  
  
  RESULTS
  We apply five new statistical methods, including partial least squares, penalized partial least squares, LASSO, nearest shrunken centroids and random forest, to two real datasets and compare their performance for multiclass classification. It is found that the five statistical methods perform similarly on each of the two datasets: it is difficult to correctly distinguish the etiologies of heart failure in one dataset whereas it is easy for the other one. In a simulation study, it is confirmed that the five methods tend to have close performance, though the random forest seems to have a slight edge.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  For some gene expression data, several recently developed discriminant methods may perform similarly. More importantly, one must remain cautious when assessing the discriminating performance using gene expression profiles based on a small dataset; our analysis suggests the importance of utilizing multiple or larger datasets.
authors.affiliation: Division of Biostatistics, School of Public Health, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA. xiaohong@biostat.umn.edu
authors.forename: Xiaohong
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Huang
authors.forename: Wei
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Pan
authors.forename: Suzanne
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Grindle
authors.forename: Xinqiang
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Han
authors.forename: Yingjie
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Chen
authors.forename: Soon J
authors.initials: SJ
authors.lastname: Park
authors.forename: Leslie W
authors.initials: LW
authors.lastname: Miller
authors.forename: Jennifer
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Hall
mesh_terms: D003627:Data Interpretation, Statistical; D020869:Gene Expression Profiling / Q000379:methods*; D006333:Heart Failure / Q000145:classification* / Q000235:genetics*; D006801:Humans; D016014:Linear Models; D008297:Male; D008957:Models, Genetic; D015233:Models, Statistical; D017202:Myocardial Ischemia / Q000150:complications; D020411:Oligonucleotide Array Sequence Analysis / Q000379:methods*