ULDA-based heuristic feature selection method for proteomic profile analysis and biomarker discovery

Uncorrelated linear discriminant analysis (ULDA)-based heuristic feature selection (ULDA-HFS) method was proposed for sample classification and feature extraction for SELDI-TOF MS ovarian cancer data. The ULDA-HFS method includes 4 steps: (1) noise reduction and normalization; (2) selection of discriminatory bins with CHI2 method; (3) peak detection and alignment for each selected bins; and (4) selection of several peaks as potential biomarkers by means of ULDA. As a result, 7 m/z locations were selected in this study; they were 245.3, 559.4, 565.6, 704.2, 717.2, 2667 and 4074.4. To evaluate the classification impression, PCA, PLS-DA and ULDA were performed for discriminant analysis and ULDA obtained the perfect separation. Finally, the 7 selected potential biomarkers were evaluated by ULDA, both sensitivity and specificity were 100%. The 7 m/z values obtained may provide clues for ovarian cancer biomarker discovery. Once the proteins were identified at these m/z locations, it can be used as specific protein for early detection and diagnosis for ovarian cancer.