Gene analysis framework for biomarker mining

A biomarker is a substance that is used as a biological parameter of pathological or psychological conditions. Recent progress of bioinformatics technology has enabled large-scale screening of biomarker candidates. As described in this paper, we introduce a gene analysis method, LEAF, for finding informative genes from gene expression data, and propose an additional algorithm for extending LEAF. An iterative forward selection method incorporating the concept of LOOCV, LEAF also provides a discrimination power score (DPS) of genes. Our method shows that the biological functions of extracted genes accorded well with past findings. Our method is a useful tool for many researchers engaged in bioinformatics.