Biological pathway selection through nonlinear dimension reduction

Abstract

In the analysis of high-throughput biological data, it is often believed that the biological units such as genes behave interactively by groups, that is, pathways in our context. It is conceivable that utilization of priorly available pathway knowledge would greatly facilitate both interpretation and estimation in statistical analysis of such high-dimensional biological data. In this article, we propose a 2-step procedure for the purpose of identifying pathways that are related to and influence the clinical phenotype. In the first step, a nonlinear dimension reduction method is proposed, which permits flexible within-pathway gene interactions as well as nonlinear pathway effects on the response. In the second step, a regularized model-based pathway ranking and selection procedure is developed that is built upon the summary features extracted from the first step. Simulations suggest that the new method performs favorably compared to the existing solutions. An analysis of a glioblastoma microarray data finds 4 pathways that have evidence of support from the biological literature.