RRHGE: a novel approach to classify the estrogen receptor based breast cancer subtypes

Breast cancer is the most common type of cancer among females with a high mortality rate. It is essential to classify the estrogen receptor based breast cancer subtypes into correct subclasses, so that the right treatments can be applied to lower the mortality rate. Using gene signatures derived from gene interaction networks to classify breast cancers has proven to be more reproducible and can achieve higher classification performance. However, the interactions in the gene interaction network usually contain many false-positive interactions that do not have any biological meanings. Therefore, it is a challenge to incorporate the reliability assessment of interactions when deriving gene signatures from gene interaction networks. How to effectively extract gene signatures from available resources is critical to the success of cancer classification.