Integration of microarray and textual data improves the prognosis prediction of breast, lung and ovarian cancer patients.

Microarray data are notoriously noisy such that models predicting clinically relevant outcomes often contain many false positive genes. Integration of other data sources can alleviate this problem and enhance gene selection and model building. Probabilistic models provide a natural solution to integrate information by using the prior over model space. We investigated if the use of text information from PUBMED abstracts in the structure prior of a Bayesian network could improve the prediction of the prognosis in cancer. Our results show that prediction of the outcome with the text prior was significantly better compared to not using a prior, both on a well known microarray data set and on three independent microarray data sets.