A longitudinal feature selection method identifies relevant genes to distinguish complicated injury and uncomplicated injury over time

BACKGROUND: Feature selection and gene set analysis are of increasing interest in the field of bioinformatics. While these two approaches have been developed for different purposes, we describe how some gene set analysis methods can be utilized to conduct feature selection. METHODS: We adopted a gene set analysis method, the significance analysis of microarray gene set reduction (SAMGSR) algorithm, to carry out feature selection for longitudinal gene expression data. RESULTS: Using a real-world application and simulated data, it is demonstrated that the proposed SAMGSR extension outperforms other relevant methods. In this study, we illustrate that a gene’s expression profiles over time can be regarded as a gene set and then a suitable gene set analysis method can be utilized directly to select relevant genes associated with the phenotype of interest over time. CONCLUSIONS: We believe this work will motivate more research to bridge feature selection and gene set analysis, with the development of novel algorithms capable of carrying out feature selection for longitudinal gene expression data. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1186/s12911-018-0685-8) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.