Summary
Background: Radiotherapy has serious side effects and thus requires prudent and cautious evaluation.
However, obtaining protein expression profiles is expensive and timeconsuming, making
it necessary to develop a theoretical and rational procedure for predicting the radiotherapy
outcome for bladder cancer when working with limited data.
Objective: A procedure for estimating the performance of radiotherapy is proposed in this research.
The population domain (range of the population) of proteins and the relationships
among proteins are considered to increase prediction accuracy.
Methods: This research uses modified extreme value theory (MEVT), which is used to estimate
the population domain of proteins, and correlation coefficients and prediction intervals
to overcome the lack of knowledge regarding relationships among proteins.
Results: When the size of the training data set was 5 samples, the mean absolute percentage
error rate (MAPE) was 31.6200%; MAPE fell to 13.5505% when the number of samples was
increased to 30. The standard deviation (SD) of forecasting error fell from 3.0609%
for 5 samples to 1.2415% for 30 samples. These results show that the proposed procedure
yields accurate and stable results, and is suitable for use with small data sets.
Conclusions: The results show that considering the relationships among proteins is necessary when
predicting the outcome of radiotherapy.
Key words
Small data set - artificial neural network - bladder cancer - modified extreme value
theory
