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Biomedical subjects

Ioannis Tsamardinos

Publications and source records attributed to Ioannis Tsamardinos.

6 recordsLinked to original sources

GEMS: a system for automated cancer diagnosis and biomarker discovery from microarray gene expression data.

The success of treatment of patients with cancer depends on establishing an accurate diagnosis. To this end, we have built a system called GEMS (gene expression model selector) for the automated development and evaluation of high-quality cancer diagnostic models and biomarker discovery from microarray gene expression data. In order to determine and equip the system with the best performing diagnostic methodologies in this domain, we first conducted a comprehensive evaluation of classification algorithms using 11 cancer microarray datasets. In this paper we present a preliminary evaluation of the system with five new datasets. The performance of the models produced automatically by GEMS is comparable or better than the results obtained by human analysts. Additionally, we performed a cross-dataset evaluation of the system. This involved using a dataset to build a diagnostic model and to estimate its future performance, then applying this model and evaluating its performance on a different dataset. We found that models produced by GEMS indeed perform well in independent samples and, furthermore, the cross-validation performance estimates output by the system approximate well the error obtained by the independent validation. GEMS is freely available for download for non-commercial use from http://www.gems-system.org.

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A comparison of Bayesian network learning algorithms from continuous data.

Learning a Bayesian network from data is an important problem in biomedicine for the automatic construction of decision support systems and inference of plausible causal relations. Most Bayesian network learning algorithms require discrete data; however discretization may impact the quality of the learned structure. In this project, we present a comparison of different approaches for learning from continuous data to identify the most promising one and to quantify the impact of discretization in Bayesian network learning.

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Text categorization models for high-quality article retrieval in internal medicine.

OBJECTIVE Finding the best scientific evidence that applies to a patient problem is becoming exceedingly difficult due to the exponential growth of medical publications. The objective of this study was to apply machine learning techniques to automatically identify high-quality, content-specific articles for one time period in internal medicine and compare their performance with previous Boolean-based PubMed clinical query filters of Haynes et al. DESIGN The selection criteria of the ACP Journal Club for articles in internal medicine were the basis for identifying high-quality articles in the areas of etiology, prognosis, diagnosis, and treatment. Naive Bayes, a specialized AdaBoost algorithm, and linear and polynomial support vector machines were applied to identify these articles. MEASUREMENTS The machine learning models were compared in each category with each other and with the clinical query filters using area under the receiver operating characteristic curves, 11-point average recall precision, and a sensitivity/specificity match method. RESULTS In most categories, the data-induced models have better or comparable sensitivity, specificity, and precision than the clinical query filters. The polynomial support vector machine models perform the best among all learning methods in ranking the articles as evaluated by area under the receiver operating curve and 11-point average recall precision. CONCLUSION This research shows that, using machine learning methods, it is possible to automatically build models for retrieving high-quality, content-specific articles using inclusion or citation by the ACP Journal Club as a gold standard in a given time period in internal medicine that perform better than the 1994 PubMed clinical query filters.

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A comprehensive evaluation of multicategory classification methods for microarray gene expression cancer diagnosis.

MOTIVATION: Cancer diagnosis is one of the most important emerging clinical applications of gene expression microarray technology. We are seeking to develop a computer system for powerful and reliable cancer diagnostic model creation based on microarray data. To keep a realistic perspective on clinical applications we focus on multicategory diagnosis. To equip the system with the optimum combination of classifier, gene selection and cross-validation methods, we performed a systematic and comprehensive evaluation of several major algorithms for multicategory classification, several gene selection methods, multiple ensemble classifier methods and two cross-validation designs using 11 datasets spanning 74 diagnostic categories and 41 cancer types and 12 normal tissue types. RESULTS: Multicategory support vector machines (MC-SVMs) are the most effective classifiers in performing accurate cancer diagnosis from gene expression data. The MC-SVM techniques by Crammer and Singer, Weston and Watkins and one-versus-rest were found to be the best methods in this domain. MC-SVMs outperform other popular machine learning algorithms, such as k-nearest neighbors, backpropagation and probabilistic neural networks, often to a remarkable degree. Gene selection techniques can significantly improve the classification performance of both MC-SVMs and other non-SVM learning algorithms. Ensemble classifiers do not generally improve performance of the best non-ensemble models. These results guided the construction of a software system GEMS (Gene Expression Model Selector) that automates high-quality model construction and enforces sound optimization and performance estimation procedures. This is the first such system to be informed by a rigorous comparative analysis of the available algorithms and datasets. AVAILABILITY: The software system GEMS is available for download from http://www.gems-system.org for non-commercial use. CONTACT: alexander.statnikov@vanderbilt.edu.

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A novel algorithm for scalable and accurate Bayesian network learning.

Bayesian Networks (BN) is a knowledge representation formalism that has been proven to be valuable in biomedicine for constructing decision support systems and for generating causal hypotheses from data. Given the emergence of datasets in medicine and biology with thousands of variables and that current algorithms do not scale more than a few hundred variables in practical domains, new efficient and accurate algorithms are needed to learn high quality BNs from data. We present a new algorithm called Max-Min Hill-Climbing (MMHC) that builds upon and improves the Sparse Candidate (SC) algorithm; a state-of-the-art algorithm that scales up to datasets involving hundreds of variables provided the generating networks are sparse. Compared to the SC, on a number of datasets from medicine and biology, (a) MMHC discovers BNs that are structurally closer to the data-generating BN, (b) the discovered networks are more probable given the data, (c) MMHC is computationally more efficient and scalable than SC, and (d) the generating networks are not required to be uniformly sparse nor is the user of MMHC required to guess correctly the network connectivity

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Methods for multi-category cancer diagnosis from gene expression data: a comprehensive evaluation to inform decision support system development.

Cancer diagnosis is a major clinical applications area of gene expression microarray technology. We are seeking to develop a system for cancer diagnostic model creation based on microarray data. In order to equip the system with the optimal combination of data modeling methods, we performed a comprehensive evaluation of several major classification algorithms, gene selection methods, and cross-validation designs using 11 datasets spanning 74 diagnostic categories (41 cancer types and 12 normal tissue types). The Multi-Category Support Vector Machine techniques by Crammer and Singer, Weston and Watkins, and one-versus-rest were found to be the best methods and they outperform other learning algorithms such as K-Nearest Neighbors and Neural Networks often to a remarkable degree. Gene selection techniques are shown to significantly improve classification performance. These results guided the development of a software system that fully automates cancer diagnostic model construction with quality on par with or better than previously published results derived by expert human analysts.

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