Bone is the most frequent organ for breast cancer metastasis, and thus it is essential to predict the bone metastasis of breast cancer. In our work, we constructed a gene dependency network based on the hypothesis that the relation between one gene and the risk of bone metastasis might be affected by another gene. Then, based on the structure controllability theory, we mined the driver gene set which can control the whole network in the gene dependency network, and the signature genes were selected from them. Survival analysis showed that the signature could distinguish the bone metastasis risks of cancer patients in the test data set and independent data set. Besides, we used the signature genes to construct a centroid classifier. The results showed that our method is effective and performed better than published methods.
Keywords: bone metastasis; breast cancer; driver gene set; gene dependency network; structure controllability theory.