Discriminating early- and late-stage cancers using multiple kernel learning on gene sets

Motivation: Identifying molecular mechanisms that drive cancers from early to late stages is highly important to develop new preventive and therapeutic strategies. Standard machine learning algorithms could be used to discriminate early-and late-stage cancers from each other using their genomic characterizations. Even though these algorithms would get satisfactory predictive performance, their knowledge extraction capability would be quite restricted due to highly correlated nature of genomic data. That is why we need algorithms that can also extract relevant information about these biological mechanisms using our prior knowledge about pathways/gene sets.