Identification of High-Order Single-Nucleotide Polymorphism Barcodes in Breast Cancer Using a Hybrid Taguchi-Genetic Algorithm: Case-Control Study

Abstract

Background Breast cancer has a major disease burden in the female population, and it is a highly genome-associated human disease. However, in genetic studies of complex diseases, modern geneticists face challenges in detecting interactions among loci. Objective This study aimed to investigate whether variations of single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) are associated with histopathological tumor characteristics in breast cancer patients. Methods A hybrid Taguchi-genetic algorithm (HTGA) was proposed to identify the high-order SNP barcodes in a breast cancer case-control study. A Taguchi method was used to enhance a genetic algorithm (GA) for identifying high-order SNP barcodes. The Taguchi method was integrated into the GA after the crossover operations in order to optimize the generated offspring systematically for enhancing the GA search ability. Results The proposed HTGA effectively converged to a promising region within the problem space and provided excellent SNP barcode identification. Regression analysis was used to validate the association between breast cancer and the identified high-order SNP barcodes. The maximum OR was less than 1 (range 0.870-0.755) for two- to seven-order SNP barcodes. Conclusions We systematically evaluated the interaction effects of 26 SNPs within growth factor–related genes for breast carcinogenesis pathways. The HTGA could successfully identify relevant high-order SNP barcodes by evaluating the differences between cases and controls. The validation results showed that the HTGA can provide better fitness values as compared with other methods for the identification of high-order SNP barcodes using breast cancer case-control data sets.