Back

Identification of a Novel miRNA Expression Signature for Lung Adenocarcinoma Using Systematic Machine Learning Optimization

Agrawal, S.; Mitra, P.

2026-01-12 cancer biology
10.64898/2026.01.10.698764 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Lung adenocarcinoma (LUAD), the most common lung cancer subtype, urgently requires reliable microRNA (miRNA) biomarkers for early detection and therapy. This study introduces a machine learning framework integrating feature stability analysis, precision-recall curves, and resampling strategies (e.g., SMOTE) to robustly identify miRNA signatures from imbalanced TCGA-LUAD data (564 samples: 519 tumor, 45 normal). We selected 8 stable features (hsa-mir-143, hsamir-210, hsa-mir-21, hsa-mir-183, hsa-mir-96, hsa-mir-182, hsa-mir-130b, hsa-mir-141) with 100% cross-fold stability via 10-fold cross-validation. A Random Forest classifier yielded excellent training performance (AUC: 1.0000; accuracy: 98%) and good generalization on an independent test set (AUC: 0.8438; accuracy: 75%). Consistent feature importance across folds supports biological relevance over overfitting. The framework mitigates class imbalance, high dimensionality, and distribution shifts--key hurdles in biomarker discovery. These reproducible miRNAs hold promise as non-invasive diagnostic tools, though external validation underscores generalization challenges across cohorts.

Matching journals

The top 8 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.