Aim: Breast cancers at different stages have tremendous differences on both phenotypic and molecular patterns. The developmental stage is an essential factor in the clinical decision of treatment plans, but was usually formulated as a classification problem, which ignored the consecutive relationships among them.
Materials & methods: This study proposed a regression-based procedure to detect the stage biomarkers of breast cancers. Biomarkers were detected by the Lasso and Ridge algorithms.
Results & conclusion: A collaboration duet of Lasso and Ridge regression algorithms achieved the best performances, with classification accuracy (Acc) equal to 0.8294 and regression goodness-of-fit (R2) equal to 0.7810. The 265 biomarker genes were enriched with the signal peptide-based secretion function with the Bonferroni-corrected p-value equal to 6.9408e-3 and false discovery rate (FDR) equal to 1.1614e-2.
Keywords: Lasso; breast cancer; developmental stage; feature selection; ridge; stage regression.