Meta-analysis of gene expression data: a predictor-based approach.
BACKGROUND
With the increasing availability of cancer microarray data sets there is a growing need for integrative computational methods that evaluate multiple independent microarray data sets investigating a common theme or disorder. Meta-analysis techniques are designed to overcome the low sample size typical to microarray experiments and yield more valid and informative results than each experiment separately.


RESULTS
We propose a new meta-analysis technique that aims at finding a set of classifying genes, whose expression level may be used to answering the classification question in hand. Specifically, we apply our method to two independent lung cancer microarray data sets and identify a joint core subset of genes which putatively play an important role in tumor genesis of the lung. The robustness of the identified joint core set is demonstrated on a third unseen lung cancer data set, where it leads to successful classification using very few top-ranked genes. Identifying such a set of genes is of significant importance when searching for biologically meaningful biomarkers.


BACKGROUND
Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
Fishel
Irit
I
School of Medicine, Tel-Aviv University, Tel-Aviv 69978, Israel.
Kaufman
Alon
A
Ruppin
Eytan
E
D000465:Algorithms; D014408:Biomarkers, Tumor / Q000032:analysis*; D003628:Database Management Systems; D030562:Databases, Protein; D003936:Diagnosis, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods; D020869:Gene Expression Profiling / Q000379:methods*; D006801:Humans; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval / Q000379:methods; D008175:Lung Neoplasms / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000378:metabolism*; D015201:Meta-Analysis as Topic; D009363:Neoplasm Proteins / Q000032:analysis*; D020411:Oligonucleotide Array Sequence Analysis / Q000379:methods*; D012680:Sensitivity and Specificity
D014408:Biomarkers, Tumor; D009363:Neoplasm Proteins