Developing a Molecular Prognostic Predictor of a Cancer based on a Small Sample

One Important problem in a cancer microarray study is to identify a set of genes from which a molecular prognostic indicator can be developed. In parallel with this problem is to validate the chosen set of genes. We develop in this note a K-fold cross validation procedure by combining a 'pre-validation' technique and a bootstrap resampling procedure in the Cox regression . The pre-validation technique predicts the microarray predictor of a case without having seen the true class level of the case. It was suggested by Tibshirani and Efron (2002) to avoid the possible over-fitting in the regression in which a microarray based predictor is employed. The bootstrap resampling procedure for the Cox regression was proposed by Sauerbrei and Schumacher (1992) as a means of overcoming the instability of a stepwise selection procedure. We apply this K-fold cross validation to the microarray data of 92 gastric cancers of which the experiment was conducted at Cancer Metastasis Research Center, Yonsei University. We also share some of our experience on the 'false positive' result due to the information leak.