Pathway-structured predictive modeling for multi-level drug response in multiple myeloma

Molecular analyses suggest that myeloma is composed of distinct sub-types that have different molecular pathologies and various response rates to certain treatments. Drug responses in multiple myeloma (MM) are usually recorded as a multi-level ordinal outcome. One of the goals of drug response studies is to predict which response category any patients belong to with high probability based on their clinical and molecular features. However, as most of genes have small effects, gene-based models may provide limited predictive accuracy. In that case, methods for predicting multi-level ordinal drug responses by incorporating biological pathways are desired but have not been developed yet.