A rank weighted classification for plasma proteomic profiles based on case-based reasoning.

Background: It is a challenge to precisely classify plasma proteomic profiles into their clinical status based solely on their patterns even though distinct patterns of plasma proteomic profiles are regarded as potential to be a biomarker because the profiles have large within-subject variances.

Methods: The present study proposes a rank-based weighted CBR classifier (RWCBR). We hypothesized that a CBR classifier is advantageous when individual patterns are specific and do not follow the general patterns like proteomic profiles, and robust feature weights can enhance the performance of the CBR classifier. To validate RWCBR, we conducted numerical experiments, which predict the clinical status of the 70 subjects using plasma proteomic profiles by comparing the performances to previous approaches.

Results: According to the numerical experiment, SVM maintained the highest minimum values of Precision and Recall, but RWCBR showed highest average value in all information indices, and it maintained the smallest standard deviation in F-1 score and G-measure.

Conclusions: RWCBR approach showed potential as a robust classifier in predicting the clinical status of the subjects for plasma proteomic profiles.