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Main Authors: Padron-Manrique, Cristian, Valdez, Juan José Oropeza, Resendis-Antonio, Osbaldo
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.10343
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author Padron-Manrique, Cristian
Valdez, Juan José Oropeza
Resendis-Antonio, Osbaldo
author_facet Padron-Manrique, Cristian
Valdez, Juan José Oropeza
Resendis-Antonio, Osbaldo
contents Tissue-of-origin signals dominate pan-cancer gene expression, often obscuring molecular features linked to patient survival. This hampers the discovery of generalizable biomarkers, as models tend to overfit tissue-specific patterns rather than capture survival-relevant signals. To address this, we propose a Domain-Adversarial Neural Network (DANN) trained on TCGA RNA-seq data to learn representations less biased by tissue and more focused on survival. Identifying tissue-independent genetic profiles is key to revealing core cancer programs. We assess the DANN using: (1) Standard SHAP, based on the original input space and DANN's mortality classifier; (2) A layer-aware strategy applied to hidden activations, including an unsupervised manifold from raw activations and a supervised manifold from mortality-specific SHAP values. Standard SHAP remains confounded by tissue signals due to biases inherent in its computation. The raw activation manifold was dominated by high-magnitude activations, which masked subtle tissue and mortality-related signals. In contrast, the layer-aware SHAP manifold offers improved low-dimensional representations of both tissue and mortality signals, independent of activation strength, enabling subpopulation stratification and pan-cancer identification of survival-associated genes.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_10343
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Domain-Adversarial Neural Network and Explainable AI for Reducing Tissue-of-Origin Signal in Pan-cancer Mortality Classification
Padron-Manrique, Cristian
Valdez, Juan José Oropeza
Resendis-Antonio, Osbaldo
Machine Learning
Quantitative Methods
Tissue-of-origin signals dominate pan-cancer gene expression, often obscuring molecular features linked to patient survival. This hampers the discovery of generalizable biomarkers, as models tend to overfit tissue-specific patterns rather than capture survival-relevant signals. To address this, we propose a Domain-Adversarial Neural Network (DANN) trained on TCGA RNA-seq data to learn representations less biased by tissue and more focused on survival. Identifying tissue-independent genetic profiles is key to revealing core cancer programs. We assess the DANN using: (1) Standard SHAP, based on the original input space and DANN's mortality classifier; (2) A layer-aware strategy applied to hidden activations, including an unsupervised manifold from raw activations and a supervised manifold from mortality-specific SHAP values. Standard SHAP remains confounded by tissue signals due to biases inherent in its computation. The raw activation manifold was dominated by high-magnitude activations, which masked subtle tissue and mortality-related signals. In contrast, the layer-aware SHAP manifold offers improved low-dimensional representations of both tissue and mortality signals, independent of activation strength, enabling subpopulation stratification and pan-cancer identification of survival-associated genes.
title Domain-Adversarial Neural Network and Explainable AI for Reducing Tissue-of-Origin Signal in Pan-cancer Mortality Classification
topic Machine Learning
Quantitative Methods
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.10343