Data collection

mRNA Sequence data from 374 HCC samples came from TCGA (https://portal.gdc.cancer.gov/repository). Corresponding clinical data – including survival time, survival status, sex, age, race, body mass index (BMI), histological grading, alpha fetoprotein (AFP) level, vascular invasion, American Joint Committee on Cancer tumor, node, metastasis (AJCC-TNM) stage, family history of cancer, prior malignancy history, and new tumors presenting following initial treatment, as well as tumor status – were taken from the University of California Santa Cruz’s Xena Funcational Genomics Exporer (https://xenabrowser.net/). The CTNNB1 mutation sample list was obtained from the cBioPortal (https://www.cbioportal.org/). We downloaded another independent mRNA sequence dataset and corresponding clinical data from the ICGC (https://icgc.org/) to conduct external validation. The two sequence datasets came from the Illumina HiSeq RNA-Seq platform. We downloaded the immune-related gene list from the ImmPort database (https://immport.niaid.nih.gov). It should be stated that acquisition of the above data followed the data access policies and release guidelines for these databases. Therefore, there was no requirement to obtain the approval from local ethics committee.