Infer related genes from large scale gene expression dataset with embedding

Abstract

Artificial neural networks (ANNs) have been utilized for classification and prediction task with remarkable accuracy. However, its implications for unsupervised data mining using molecular data is under-explored. We adopted a method of unsupervised ANN, namely word embedding, to extract biologically relevant information from TCGA gene expression dataset. Ground truth relationship, such as cancer types of the input sample and semantic meaning of genes, were showed to retain in the resulting entity matrices. We also demonstrated the interpretability and usage of these matrices in shortlisting candidates from a long gene list. This method is feasible to mine big volume of biological data, and would be a valuable tool to discover novel knowledge from omics data. The resulting embedding matrices mined from TCGA gene expression data are interactively explorable online (http://bit.ly/tcga-embedding-cancer) and could serve as an informative reference.