Abstract
Accurate classification of breast cancer subtypes from gene expression data is critical for diagnosis and treatment selection. However, such datasets are characterized by high dimensionality and limited sample size, posing challenges for machine learning models. In this study, we evaluate the impact of model complexity and feature selection on subtype classification performance using TCGA-BRCA gene expression data. Logistic regression, random forest, and support vector machine (SVM) models were trained using varying numbers of highly variable genes (50 to 20,518). Performance was evaluated using stratified 5-fold cross-validation and assessed with accuracy and macro F1 score. While all models achieved high accuracy, macro F1 analysis revealed substantial differences in subtype-level performance. Logistic regression demonstrated the most stable and balanced performance across subtypes, including improved detection of rare classes. Random forest underperformed on minority subtypes despite strong overall accuracy, while SVM showed sensitivity to feature dimensionality. These findings highlight the importance of model simplicity, evaluation metrics, and feature selection in high-dimensional biological classification tasks.
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Sep 8, 2026eess.IV
High-risk non-muscle-invasive bladder cancer (HR-NMIBC) carries substantial risks of recurrence and progression, while current clinical risk stratification remains limited. CHIMERA was established as a multimodal AI challenge to benchmark prediction in HR-NMIBC under standardized evaluation. Task BRS predicts RNA-seq-defined BCG Response Subtypes from histopathology and structured clinicopathological data, whereas Task Progression models time-to-progression using histopathology, structured data, and RNA sequencing. A multimodal dataset of 368 patients was divided into public training and hidden validation and test sets. In total, 159 submissions were made, and 13 top-performing models were selected for benchmarking. The best models achieved a weighted F1 score of 0.73 for Task BRS and a C-index of 0.68 for Task Progression. Post-challenge analyses revealed task-dependent modality contributions, cohort-dependent performance degradation, and sensitivity to missing structured data. In Task BRS, histopathology partly compensated for pathology-derived structured variables, whereas progression models showed greater dependence on complementary inputs. Cross-model error analysis further identified patients that were consistently difficult across different architectures, with T1 substage associated with prediction difficulty. These findings highlight barriers to transportability and the importance of missingness-aware modeling and independent multi-institutional validation. CHIMERA provides a standardized multimodal benchmark for bladder cancer and a framework for studying not only model performance, but also robustness, information sufficiency, and patient-level prediction failure.
Catherine Chia, Tongjie Wang, Robert Spaans +12
Nov 14, 2023eess.IV
This research aims to investigate the classification accuracy of various state-of-the-art image classification models across different categories of breast ultrasound images, as defined by the Breast Imaging Reporting and Data System (BI-RADS). To achieve this, we used 2,945 sonomammogram images for training and 936 images for validation, with the source cohort reported as comprising 1,540 patients. In order to conduct a thorough analysis, we employed six advanced classification architecture families, including VGG19 \cite{simonyan2014very}, ResNet50 \cite{he2016deep}, GoogleNet \cite{szegedy2015going}, ConvNeXt \cite{liu2022convnet}, EfficientNet \cite{tan2019efficientnet}, and Vision Transformers (ViT) \cite{dosovitskiy2020image}, instead of traditional machine learning models. We evaluate models in three different settings: full fine-tuning, linear evaluation and training from scratch. Our findings demonstrate the effectiveness and capability of our Computer-Aided Diagnosis (CAD) system, with a remarkable accuracy of 76.39% and an F1 score of 67.94% in the full fine-tuning setting. Our findings indicate the potential for enhanced diagnostic accuracy in the field of breast imaging, providing a solid foundation for future endeavors aiming to improve the precision and reliability of CAD systems in medical imaging.
Malitha Gunawardhana, Norbert Zolek
Apr 27, 2026cs.LG
Motivation: Multi-omics integration can improve cancer subtyping, but modality informativeness and noise vary across cancer types and patients. Existing graph-based methods optimize modality weights jointly with the classification objective and therefore lack independent reliability estimates, so low-quality omics distort patient similarity graphs and amplify noise through message passing. Results: We propose CMGL, a two-stage framework that estimates per-sample modality reliability through evidential deep learning and uses the frozen confidence scores to guide cross-omics fusion and graph construction. On four MLOmics cancer-subtype tasks and the 32-class pan-cancer task, CMGL consistently improves over the strongest baseline, surpassing it by 4.03% in average accuracy on the four single-cancer tasks. Its representations recover the PAM50 intrinsic subtypes of breast invasive carcinoma (BRCA), and the BRCA-trained model transfers without fine-tuning to kidney renal clear cell carcinoma (KIRC), stratifying patients into prognostically distinct groups.
Boyang Fan, Hengchuang Yin, Siyu Yi +5