A Feature Selection and Association Rule Approach to Identify Genes Associated with Metastasis and Low Survival in Sarcoma

Abstract

Sarcomas are rare mesodermal tumors of heterogeneous nature and have a higher incidence in children. The relative 5-year survival rate for patients with metastatic sarcoma is usually low. Standard treatment for sarcomas involves surgical resection, and investigating the genetic basis of these tumors through genome-wide analysis is crucial due to their rarity and late diagnosis. This work proposes a methodology that combines preprocessing, feature selection and association rule mining to identify relevant genes and significant relationships in biological data from sarcoma patients. Our study aims to identify the relationships between metastasis-associated genes and patient survival of less than 5 years. The proposed approach was applied to a sarcoma dataset containing data on gene expression, metastasis occurrence, and survival time, revealing a set of biologically relevant gene interactions associated with sarcoma metastasis and low survival rates. The combined use of these techniques can facilitate the identification of biomarkers or gene signatures associated with the disease and provide insight into the underlying biological mechanisms involved in sarcomas.