Identification of rheumatoid arthritis and osteoarthritis patients by transcriptome-based rule set generation

Discrimination of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) patients from patients with other inflammatory/degenerative joint diseases or healthy individuals purely on the basis of genes differentially expressed in high-throughput data has proven very difficult. Thus, the present study sought to achieve such discrimination by employing a novel unbiased approach using rule-based classifiers. Three multi-center genome-wide transcriptomic data sets (Affymetrix HG- U133 A/B) from a total of 79 individuals, including 20 healthy controls (control group - CG), as well as 26 osteoarthritis (OA) and 33 RA patients, were used to infer rule- based classifiers to discriminate the disease groups. The rules were ranked with respect to Kiendls statistical relevance index, and the resulting rule set was optimized by pruning. The rule sets were inferred separately from data of one of three centers and applied to the two remaining centers for validation. All rules from the optimized rule sets of all centers were used to analyze their biological relevance applying the software Pathway Studio.

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Woetzel D, Huber R, Kupfer P, Pohlers D, Pfaff M, Driesch D, Häupl T, Koczan D, Stiehl P, Guthke R, Kinne RW