An "intersection dataset" is interesting because the gain (of each independent dataset) can be evaluated in respect to a common gold standard, and thus could help avoiding a possible bias.
For small graphs, e.g. single or few-room datasets, this can be evaluated exhaustively to find the global optimum, for larger datasets a faster, approximative algorithm may be needed.
Therefore, to assess the overall prognostic significance of any gene g in the integrated dataset, their VC can be evaluated as the weighted combination of α and β; that is, (5) VC (g ) = (τ 1 ∗ α (g ) ) + (τ 2 ∗ β (g ) ), where α(g ) and β(g ) represent correlation factor and penalized factor for gene g, respectively, and τ1 and τ2 represent the weight associated with α and β, respectively.
The relevance of the proposed methods can be evaluated using microarray datasets available in the public domain but the method is in principle applicable to other high-throughput methods.
More specifically, the presence of infarcted myocardium at or adjacent to the region of maximal mechanical delay can be evaluated using SPECT datasets.
For survival predictions, we used distant metastasis-free survival as the endpoint since it provides the largest number of patients that can be evaluated across 13 datasets (CAL [ 8], EMC2 [ 9], DFHCC [ 10], MAINZ [ 11], MDA5 [ 12], MSK [ 13], NKI [ 14], TAM [ 15], TRANSBIG [ 16], UCSF [ 17], UNT [ 18], VDX [ 19] and VDX3 [ 20]).
The reliability of the model reporting the six most similar compounds found in the CAESAR dataset, and their experimental and predicted values, can be evaluated.
In turn, this may suggest possible courses of action, such as further investigation or treatment (whose outcome can be evaluated against the normative dataset) [ 37, 38].
By using our dataset with a large number of subjects from a wide range of view angle, such problem can be evaluated in a statistically reliable way.
Ideally validation of multiple datasets should occur at the same time so that the impact of accepting reports from more than one source can be evaluated.
