Predicting survival times for neuroblastoma patients using RNA-seq expression profiles.BACKGROUND
 In this study, expression profiles from RNA-sequencing are used to predict survival times directly.  The use of RNA-seq data is shown to improve accuracy in comparison to using clinical data alone for predicting overall survival times.  This suggests that the ensemble is able to effectively combine the individual RNA-seq datasets.


 Using predicted survival times based on RNA-seq data can provide improved prognosis by subclassifying clinically high-risk neuroblastoma patients.



RNA-seq
In this effort, the best performing model was the elastic net using both transcripts and introns together. 
elastic net
The ensemble approach gave similar results, with groups 0.42±0.10 (n=25) versus 0.82±0.05 (n=65). 
ensemble approach