Feature selection plays an important role in improving the performance of classification or reducing the dimensionality of high-dimensional datasets, such as high-throughput genomics/proteomics data in bioinformatics. As a popular approach with computational efficiency and scalability, information theory has been widely incorporated into feature selection. In this study, we propose a unique weight-based feature selection (WBFS) algorithm that assesses selected features and candidate features to identify the key protein biomarkers for classifying lung cancer subtypes from The Cancer Proteome Atlas (TCPA) database and we further explored the survival analysis between selected biomarkers and subtypes of lung cancer. Results show good performance of the combination of our WBFS method and Bayesian network for mining potential biomarkers. These candidate signatures have valuable biological significance in tumor classification and patient survival analysis. Taken together, this study proposes the WBFS method that helps to explore candidate biomarkers from biomedical datasets and provides useful information for tumor diagnosis or therapy strategies.
Keywords: Bayesian network; The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA); The Cancer Proteome Atlas (TCPA); biomarkers; feature selection; information theory; lung cancer.