A modified partial least squares regression for the analysis of gene expression data with survival information

Abstract

In DNA microarray studies, the number of genes far exceeds the number of samples and the gene expression measures are highly correlated. Partial least squares regression (PLSR) is one of the popular methods for dimensional reduction and known to be useful for the classifications of microarray data by several studies. In this study, we suggest a modified version of the partial least squares regression to analyze gene expression data with survival information. The method is designed as a new gene selection method using PLSR with an iterative procedure of imputing censored survival time. Mean square error of prediction criterion is used to determine the dimension of the model. To visualize the data, plot for variables superimposed with samples are used. The method is applied to two microarray data sets, both containing survival time. The results show that the proposed method works well for interpreting gene expression microarray data.