Wednesday, Jun 14, 2006

Computational Intelligence Society

Feature Selection in Pharmacogenetics –

Application to Calcium Channel Blockers in Hypertension

Speaker:  Dr. Troy Bremer

About the program:. The identification of useful biomarkers is becoming a common problem for assessing a drug response, treatment outcome, or adverse side effects. Typically, the biological data sets are small and have potential features that are far in excess of the number of observations. This problem is often in the form of a case-control study and analyzed as a set of univariate markers, employing multiple hypothesis testing controls. However, this problem can also be cast as a feature subset selection and statistical pattern recognition problem. While both filter and wrapper based feature subset selection methods may be appropriate for this problem, care must be taken in their application, due to various over fitting issues that can lead to biased performance estimation and poor generalization. A discussion of Kernel based feature selection tailored to small data set problems is presented with an application to the pharmacogenetics of calcium channel blockers treatment outcome in hypertension. 

About the Speaker: Troy Bremer received his B.S. degree from University of Arizona (1991) in Aerospace Engineering. He refocused his career in the application of engineering to biology and medicine in 1995 and received his Ph.D. from the University of San Diego, California in Bioengineering in 1999. He is currently the Director of Bioinformatics at Prediction Sciences, located in La Jolla CA. His interests center on the development of predictive models for biology and medicine. His focus is on development and application of statistical pattern recognition methods appropriate for small data sets. Prediction Sciences aim is to develop biomarker based diagnostics for treatment outcome in cardiovascular disease, breast and colon cancer, and CNS disorders.

Time/Place: Wednesday Jun  14, Wednesday 6:00 P.M. Lockheed Martin, 4770 Eastgate Mall San Diego, California 92121. Food served starting at 6:00 p.m followed by the 1 hr lecture 6:30 sharp with Q&A to follow.  Directions and lecture background materials available at the SD CIS website. http://ewh.ieee.org/r6/san_diego/cis/

Free for IEEE members, $5 otherwise.

Reservations/Information: Andrew Diamond (IEEE CIS San Diego Chapter Chair) (858) 509-3115, adiamond@EnvisionSystemsLLC.com