Computational biology is an interdisciplinary field that focuses on developing mathematical models and algorithms to interpret biological data so as to understand biological problems. With current high-throughput technology development, different types of biological data can be measured in a large scale, which calls for more sophisticated computational methods to analyze and interpret the data. In this dissertation research work, we propose novel methods to integrate, model and analyze multiple biological data, including microarray gene expression data, protein-DNA interaction data and protein-protein interaction data. These methods will help improve our understanding of biological systems.
First, we propose a knowledge-guided multi-scale independent component analysis (ICA) method for biomarker identification on time course microarray data. Guided by a knowledge gene pool related to a specific disease under study, the method can determine disease relevant biological components from ICA modes and then identify biologically meaningful markers related to the specific disease. We have applied the proposed method to yeast cell cycle microarray data and Rsf-1-induced ovarian cancer microarray data. The results show that our knowledge-guided ICA approach can extract biologically meaningful regulatory modes and outperform several baseline methods for biomarker identification.
Second, we propose a novel method for transcriptional regulatory network identification by integrating gene expression data and protein-DNA binding data. The approach is built upon a multi-level analysis strategy designed for suppressing false positive predictions. With this strategy, a regulatory module becomes increasingly significant as more relevant gene sets are formed at finer levels. At each level, a two-stage support vector regression (SVR) method is utilized to reduce false positive predictions by integrating binding motif information and gene expression data; a significance analysis procedure is followed to assess the significance of each regulatory module. The resulting performance on simulation data and yeast cell cycle data shows that the multi-level SVR approach outperforms other existing methods in the identification of both regulators and their target genes. We have further applied the proposed method to breast cancer cell line data to identify condition-specific regulatory modules associated with estrogen treatment. Experimental results show that our method can identify biologically meaningful regulatory modules related to estrogen signaling and action in breast cancer.
Third, we propose a bootstrapping Markov Random Filed (MRF)-based method for subnetwork identification on microarray data by incorporating protein-protein interaction data. Methodologically, an MRF-based network score is first derived by considering the dependency among genes to increase the chance of selecting hub genes. A modified simulated annealing search algorithm is then utilized to find the optimal/suboptimal subnetworks with maximal network score. A bootstrapping scheme is finally implemented to generate confident subnetworks. Experimentally, we have compared the proposed method with other existing methods, and the resulting performance on simulation data shows that the bootstrapping MRF-based method outperforms other methods in identifying ground truth subnetwork and hub genes. We have then applied our method to breast cancer data to identify significant subnetworks associated with drug resistance. The identified subnetworks not only show good reproducibility across different data sets, but indicate several pathways and biological functions potentially associated with the development of breast cancer and drug resistance. In addition, we propose to develop network-constrained support vector machines (SVM) for cancer classification and prediction, by taking into account the network structure to construct classification hyperplanes. The simulation study demonstrates the effectiveness of our proposed method. The study on the real microarray data sets shows that our network-constrained SVM, together with the bootstrapping MRF-based subnetwork identification approach, can achieve better classification performance compared with conventional biomarker selection approaches and SVMs.
We believe that the research presented in this dissertation not only provides novel and effective methods to model and analyze different types of biological data, the extensive experiments on several real microarray data sets and results also show the potential to improve the understanding of biological mechanisms related to cancers by generating novel hypotheses for further study. / Ph. D.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VTETD/oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/30192 |
| Date | 21 January 2011 |
| Creators | Chen, Li |
| Contributors | Electrical and Computer Engineering, Xuan, Jianhua Jason, Wyatt, Christopher L., Midkiff, Scott F., Lu, Chang-Tien, Wang, Yue J. |
| Publisher | Virginia Tech |
| Source Sets | Virginia Tech Theses and Dissertation |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | In Copyright, http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ |
| Relation | Chen_L_D_2010.pdf |
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