An efficient hybrid feature selection method to identify potential biomarkers in common chronic lung inflammatory diseases

Asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) are three serious lung inflammatory diseases. The understanding of the pathogenesis mechanism and the identification of potential prognostic biomarkers of these diseases can provide the patients with more efficient treatments. In this study, an efficient hybrid feature selection method was introduced in order to extract informative genes. We implemented an ontology-based ranking approach on differentially expressed genes following a wrapper method. The examination of the different gene ontologies and their combinations motivated us to propose a biological functional-based method to improve the performance of further wrapper methods. The results identified: TOM1L1, SRSF1, and GIT2 in asthma; CHCHD4, PAIP2, CRLF3, UBQLN4, TRAK1, PRELID1, VAMP4, CCM2, and APBB1IP in COPD; and TUFT1, GAB2, B4GALNT1, TNFRSF17, PRDM8, and SETDB2 in IPF as the potential biomarkers. The proposed method can be used to identify hub genes in other high-throughput datasets.