The Use of the Random Number Generator and Artificial Intelligence Analysis for Dimensionality Reduction of Follicular Lymphoma Transcriptomic Data

Follicular lymphoma (FL) is one of the most frequent subtypes of non-Hodgkin lymphomas. This research predicted the prognosis of 184 untreated follicular lymphoma patients (LLMPP GSE16131 series), using gene expression data and artificial intelligence (AI) neural networks. A new strategy based on the random number generation was used to create 120 different and independent multilayer perceptron (MLP) solutions, and 22,215 gene probes were ranked according to their averaged normalized importance for predicting the overall survival. After dimensionality reduction, the final neural network architecture included (1) newly identified predictor genes related to cell adhesion and migration, cell signaling, and metabolism (EPB41L4B, MOCOS, SPIN2A, BTD, SRGAP3, CTNS, PRB1, L1CAM, and CEP57); (2) the international prognostic index (IPI); and (3) other relevant immuno-oncology, immune microenvironment, and checkpoint markers (CD163, CSF1R, FOXP3, PDCD1, TNFRSF14 (HVEM), and IL10). The performance of this neural network was good, with an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.89. A comparison with other machine learning techniques (C5 tree, logistic regression, Bayesian network, discriminant analysis, KNN algorithms, LSVM, random trees, SVM, tree-AS, XGBoost linear, XGBoost tree, CHAID, Quest, C&R tree, random forest, and neural network) was also made. In conclusion, the overall survival of follicular lymphoma was predicted with a neural network with high accuracy.