Identification of Common Gene Signatures in Microarray and RNA-Sequencing Data Using Network-Based Regularization

Microarray and RNA-sequencing (RNA-seq) gene expression data alongside machine learning algorithms are promising in the discovery of new cancer biomarkers. However, even though they are similar in purpose, there are some fundamental differences between the two techniques. We propose a methodology for cross-platform integration, and biomarker discovery based on network-based regularization via the Twin Networks Recovery (twiner) penalty, as a strategy to enhance the selection of breast cancer gene signatures that have similar correlation patterns in both platforms. In a classification setting based on sparse logistic regression (LR) taking as classes tumor from both RNA-seq and microarray, and normal tissue samples, twiner achieved precision-recall accuracies of 99.71% and 99.57% in the training and test set, respectively. Moreover, the survival analysis results validated the biological relevance of the signatures identified by twiner. Therefore, by leveraging from the existing amount of data for microarray and RNA-seq, a single biological conclusion can be reached, independent of each technology.