A statistical framework for biomedical literature mining.

Abstract

In systems biology, it is of great interest to identify new genes that were not previously reported to be associated with biological pathways related to various functions and diseases. Identification of these new pathway-modulating genes does not only promote understanding of pathway regulation mechanisms but also allow identification of novel targets for therapeutics. Recently, biomedical literature has been considered as a valuable resource to investigate pathway-modulating genes. While the majority of currently available approaches are based on the co-occurrence of genes within an abstract, it has been reported that these approaches show only sub-optimal performances because 70% of abstracts contain information only for a single gene. To overcome such limitation, we propose a novel statistical framework based on the concept of ontology fingerprint that uses gene ontology to extract information from large biomedical literature data. The proposed framework simultaneously identifies pathway-modulating genes and facilitates interpreting functions of these new genes. We also propose a computationally efficient posterior inference procedure based on Metropolis-Hastings within Gibbs sampler for parameter updates and the poor man's reversible jump Markov chain Monte Carlo approach for model selection. We evaluate the proposed statistical framework with simulation studies, experimental validation, and an application to studies of pathway-modulating genes in yeast. The R implementation of the proposed model is currently available at https://dongjunchung.github.io/bayesGO/. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.