MicroRNA signature for interpretable breast cancer classification with subtype clue

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are short non-coding RNAs engaged in cellular regulation by suppressing genes at their post-transcriptional stage. Evidence of their involvement in breast cancer and the possibility of quantifying the their concentration in the blood has sparked the hope of using them as reliable, inexpensive and non-invasive biomarkers. While differential expression analysis succeeded in identifying groups of disregulated miRNAs among tumor and healthy samples, its intrinsic dual nature makes it inadequate for cancer subtype detection. Using artificial intelligence or machine learning to uncover complex profiles of miRNA expression associated with different breast cancer subtypes has poorly been investigated and only few recent works have explored this possibility. However, the use of the same dataset both for training and testing leaves the issue of the robustness of these results still open.