Identification of genes associated with altered gene expression and m6A profiles during hypoxia using tensor decomposition based unsupervised feature extraction

Although hypoxia is a critical factor that can drive the progression of various diseases, the mechanism underlying hypoxia itself remains unclear. Recently, m6A has been proposed as an important factor driving hypoxia. Despite successful analyses, potential genes were not selected with statistical significance but were selected based solely on fold changes. Because the number of genes is large while the number of samples is small, it was impossible to select genes using conventional feature selection methods with statistical significance. In this study, we applied the recently proposed principal component analysis (PCA), tensor decomposition (TD), and kernel tensor decomposition (KTD)-based unsupervised feature extraction (FE) to a hypoxia data set. We found that PCA, TD, and KTD-based unsupervised FE could successfully identify a limited number of genes associated with altered gene expression and m6A profiles, as well as the enrichment of hypoxia-related biological terms, with improved statistical significance.

Automated summary

In this study, the authors proposed and applied unsupervised feature extraction methods, such as principal component analysis (PCA), tensor decomposition (TD), and kernel tensor decomposition (KTD), to a hypoxia data set. These methods successfully identified a limited number of genes associated with altered gene expression and m6A profiles, as well as the enrichment of hypoxia-related biological terms, with improved statistical significance.