Identification and characterization of the lncRNA signature associated with overall survival in patients with neuroblastoma

Neuroblastoma (NB) is a commonly occurring cancer among infants and young children. Recently, long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) have been using as prognostic biomarkers for therapeutics and interventions in various cancers. Considering the poor survival of NB, the lncRNA-based therapeutic strategies must be improved. This work proposes an overall survival time estimator called SVR-NB to identify the lncRNA signature that is associated with the overall survival of patients with NB. SVR-NB is an optimized support vector regression (SVR)-based method that uses an inheritable bi-objective combinatorial genetic algorithm for feature selection. The dataset of 231 NB patients that contains overall survival information and expression profiles of 783 lncRNAs was used to design and evaluate SVR-NB from the database of gene expression omnibus accession GSE62564. SVR-NB identified a signature of 35 lncRNAs and achieved a mean squared correlation coefficient of 0.85 and a mean absolute error of 0.56 year between the actual and estimated overall survival time using 10-fold cross-validation. Further, we ranked and characterized the 35 lncRNAs according to their contribution towards the estimation accuracy. Functional annotations and co-expression gene analysis of LOC440896, LINC00632, and IGF2-AS revealed the association of co-expressed genes in Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes pathways.