Integrating microRNA and mRNA expression data for cancer classification

Classifying cancer samples from gene expression data is one of the central problems in current systems biomedicine. The problem is challenging due to the small number of samples in comparison to the number of genes (mRNAs) in a typical microarray experiment. Recent reports suggest that feature selection may help to manage the problem. Furthermore, microRNA expression profiles have shown to provide valuable knowledge in detecting cancer signatures. In this study, we present the results of a comprehensive study to assess the effect of feature selection and microRNA-mRNA data integration in cancer type prediction from microarray expression data. We prove that this integration can significantly improve prediction accuracy with a proper feature selection strategy.