1 Introduction

High-throughput, non-targeted, technologies such as transcriptomics, proteomics and metabolomics, are widely used to discover molecules which allow to efficiently discriminate between biological or clinical conditions of interest (e.g., disease vs control states). Powerful machine learning approaches such as Partial Least Square Discriminant Analysis (PLS-DA), Random Forest (RF) and Support Vector Machines (SVM) have been shown to achieve high levels of prediction accuracy. Feature selection, i.e., the selection of the few features (i.e., the molecular signature) which are of highest discriminating value, is a critical step in building a robust and relevant classifier (Guyon and Elisseeff 2003): First, dimension reduction is usefull to limit the risk of overfitting and increase the prediction stability of the model; second, intrepretation of the molecular signature is facilitated; third, in case of the development of diagnostic product, a restricted list is required for the subsequent validation steps (Rifai, Gillette, and Carr 2006).

Since the comprehensive analysis of all combinations of features is not computationally tractable, several selection techniques have been described, including filter (e.g., p-values thresholding), wrapper (e.g., recursive feature elimination), and embedded (e.g., sparse PLS) approaches (Saeys, Inza, and Larranaga 2007). The major challenge for such methods is to be fast and extract restricted and stable molecular signatures which still provide high performance of the classifier (Gromski et al. 2014; Determan 2015).

2 The biosigner package

The biosigner package implements a new wrapper feature selection algorithm:

  1. the dataset is split into training and testing subsets (by bootstraping, controling class proportion),

  2. model is trained on the training set and balanced accuracy is evaluated on the test set,

  3. the features are ranked according to their importance in the model,

  4. the relevant feature subset at level f is found by a binary search: a feature subset is considered relevant if and only if, when randomly permuting the intensities of other features in the test subsets, the proportion of increased or equal prediction accuracies is lower than a defined threshold f,

  5. the dataset is restricted to the selected features and steps 1 to 4 are repeated until the selected list of features is stable.

Three binary classifiers have been included in biosigner, namely PLS-DA, RF and SVM, as the performances of each machine learning approach may vary depending on the structure of the dataset (Determan 2015). The algorithm returns the tier of each feature for the selected classifer(s): tier S corresponds to the final signature, i.e., features which have been found significant in all the selection steps; features with tier A have been found significant in all but the last selection, and so on for tier B to D. Tier E regroup all previous round of selection.

As for a classical classification algorithm, the biosign method takes as input the x samples times features data frame (or matrix) of intensities, and the y factor (or character vector) of class labels (note that only binary classification is currently available). It returns the signature (signatureLs: selected feature names) and the trained model (modelLs) for each of the selected classifier. The plot method for biosign objects enable to visualize the individual boxplots of the selected features. Finally, the predict method allows to apply the trained classifier(s) on new datasets.

The algorithm has been successfully applied to transcriptomics and metabolomics data [Rinaudo et al. (2016); see also the Hands-on section below).

3 Hands-on

3.1 Loading

We first load the biosigner package:

library(biosigner)

We then use the diaplasma metabolomics dataset (Rinaudo et al. 2016) which results from the analysis of plasma samples from 69 diabetic patients were analyzed by reversed-phase liquid chromatography coupled to high-resolution mass spectrometry (LC-HRMS; Orbitrap Exactive) in the negative ionization mode. The raw data were pre-processed with XCMS and CAMERA (5,501 features), corrected for signal drift, log10 transformed, and annotated with an in-house spectral database. The patient’s age, body mass index, and diabetic type are recorded (Rinaudo et al. 2016).

data(diaplasma)

We attach diaplasma to the search path and display a summary of the content of the dataMatrix, sampleMetadata and variableMetadata with the view function from the (imported) ropls package:

attach(diaplasma)
library(ropls)
ropls::view(dataMatrix)
##         dim  class    mode typeof   size NAs min mean median max
##  69 x 5,501 matrix numeric double 3.3 Mb   0   0  4.2    4.4 8.2
##           m096.009t01.6    m096.922t00.8 ...    m995.603t10.2    m995.613t10.2
## DIA001 2.98126177377087 6.08172882312848 ... 3.93442594703862 3.96424920154706
## DIA002                0 6.13671997362279 ... 3.74201112636229 3.78128422428722
## ...                 ...              ... ...              ...              ...
## DIA077                0 6.12515971273103 ... 4.55458598372024 4.57310800324247
## DIA078 4.69123816772499   6.134420482337 ...  4.1816445335704 4.20696191303494