Sparse modeling, a feature selection method widely used in the machine-learning community, has been recently applied to identify associations in genetic studies including expression quantitative trait locus (eQTL) mapping. These genetic studies usually involve high dimensional data where the number of features is much larger than the number of samples. The high dimensionality of genetic data introduces a problem that there exist multiple solutions for optimizing a sparse model. In such situations, a single optimization result provides only an incomplete view of the data and lacks power to find alternative features associated with the same trait. In this article, we propose a novel method aimed to detecting alternative eQTLs where two genetic variants have alternative relationships regarding their associations with the expression of a particular gene. Our method accomplishes this goal by exploring multiple solutions sampled from the solution space. We proved our method theoretically and demonstrat...
Background ::: Colon cancer is a leading cause of worldwide cancer death. It has become clear that microRNAs (miRNAs) play a role in the progress of colon cancer and understanding the effect of miRNAs on tumorigenesis could lead to better prognosis and improved treatment. However, most studies have focused on studying differentially expressed miRNAs between tumor and non-tumor samples or between stages in tumor tissue. Limited work has conducted to study the interactions or epistasis between miRNAs and how the epistasis brings about effect on tumor progression. In this study, we investigate the main and pair-wise epistatic effects of miRNAs on the pathological stages of colon cancer ﻿using datasets from The Cancer Genome Atlas.
Berzelius failed to make use of Faraday's electrochemical laws in his laborious determination of equivalent weights.