Title
Signature Evaluation Tool (SET): a Java-based tool to evaluate and visualize the sample discrimination abilities of gene expression signatures.
Abstract
The identification of specific gene expression signature for distinguishing sample groups is a dominant field in cancer research. Although a number of tools have been developed to identify optimal gene expression signatures, the number of signature genes obtained is often overly large to be applied clinically. Furthermore, experimental verification is sometimes limited by the availability of wet-lab materials such as antibodies and reagents. A tool to evaluate the discrimination power of candidate genes is therefore in high demand by clinical researchers.Signature Evaluation Tool (SET) is a Java-based tool adopting the Golub's weighted voting algorithm as well as incorporating the visual presentation of prediction strength for each array sample. SET provides a flexible and easy-to-follow platform to evaluate the discrimination power of a gene signature. Here, we demonstrated the application of SET for several purposes: (1) for signatures consisting of a large number of genes, SET offers the ability to rapidly narrow down the number of genes; (2) for a given signature (from third party analyses or user-defined), SET can re-evaluate and re-adjust its discrimination power by selecting/de-selecting genes repeatedly; (3) for multiple microarray datasets, SET can evaluate the classification capability of a signature among datasets; and (4) by providing a module to visualize the prediction strength for each sample, SET allows users to re-evaluate the discrimination power on mis-grouped or less-certain samples. Information obtained from the above applications could be useful in prognostic analyses or clinical management decisions.Here we present SET to evaluate and visualize the sample-discrimination ability of a given gene expression signature. This tool provides a filtration function for signature identification and lies between clinical analyses and class prediction (or feature selection) tools. The simplicity, flexibility and brevity of SET could make it an invaluable tool for marker identification in clinical research.
Year
DOI
Venue
2008
10.1186/1471-2105-9-58
BMC Bioinformatics
Keywords
Field
DocType
algorithms,predictive value of tests,gene expression profiling,internet,artificial intelligence,cluster analysis,feature selection,principal component analysis,clinical research,microarrays,bioinformatics,gene expression,candidate gene,feasibility studies,selection bias
Candidate gene,Biology,Gene expression,Bioinformatics,Genetics,Java,DNA microarray,Gene expression profiling
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
9
1
1471-2105
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
27
0.37
11
Authors
7
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Chih-Hung Jen11036.67
Tsun-Po Yang2722.37
Chien-Yi Tung3270.37
Shu-Han Su4270.37
Chi-Hung Lin521734.67
Ming-Ta Hsu6622.21
Hsei-Wei Wang7895.80