Breast Cancer, Expression Profiles and Binary Regression in 7000 Dimensions

In this talk I will present a statistical model for the analysis of tumor specific gene expression profiles. I will demonstrate the use of this method in the context of a gene expression profiling study of 49 human breast cancers. The study is aimed at defining molecular characteristics of tumors that reflect estrogen receptor status. In addition to good predictive performance with respect to pure classification of the expression profiles, the model also uncovers conflicts in the data with respect to the classification of some of the tumors, highlighting them as critical cases for which additional investigations are appropriate.