title: On consensus biomarker selection.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Recent development of mass spectrometry technology enabled the analysis of complex peptide mixtures. A lot of effort is currently devoted to the identification of biomarkers in human body fluids like serum or plasma, based on which new diagnostic tests for different diseases could be constructed. Various biomarker selection procedures have been exploited in recent studies. It has been noted that they often lead to different biomarker lists and as a consequence, the patient classification may also vary.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Here we propose a new approach to the biomarker selection problem: to apply several competing feature ranking procedures and compute a consensus list of features based on their outcomes. We validate our methods on two proteomic datasets for the diagnosis of ovarian and prostate cancer.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  The proposed methodology can improve the classification results and at the same time provide a unified biomarker list for further biological examinations and interpretation.
authors.affiliation: Institute of Informatics, Warsaw University, Banacha 2 02-097 Warsaw, Poland. januszd@mimuw.edu.pl
authors.forename: Janusz
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Dutkowski
authors.forename: Anna
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Gambin
mesh_terms: D015415:Biomarkers; D032921:Consensus; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008390:Markov Chains; D008954:Models, Biological; D010051:Ovarian Neoplasms / Q000175:diagnosis*; D025341:Principal Component Analysis; D011471:Prostatic Neoplasms / Q000175:diagnosis*; D040901:Proteomics
chemical_list: D015415:Biomarkers