DeepInsight-FS: Selecting features for non-image data using convolutional neural network

Identifying smaller element or gene subsets from biological or other data types is an essential step in discovering underlying mechanisms. Statistical machine learning methods have played a key role in revealing gene subsets. However, growing data complexity is pushing the limits of these techniques. A review of the recent literature shows that arranging elements by similarity in image-form for a convolutional neural network (CNN) improves classification performance over treating them individually. Expanding on this, here we show a pipeline, DeepInsight-FS, to uncover gene subsets of clinical relevance. DeepInsight-FS converts non-image samples into image-form and performs element selection via CNN. To our knowledge, this is the first approach to employ CNN for element or gene selection on non-image data. A real world application of DeepInsight-FS to publicly available cancer data identified gene sets with significant overlap to several cancer-associated pathways suggesting the potential of this method to discover biomedically meaningful connections.