An iterative GASVM-based method: Gene selection and classification of microarray data

Abstract

Microarray technology has provided biologists with the ability to measure the expression levels of thousands of genes in a single experiment. One of the urgent issues in the use of microarray data is the selection of a smaller subset of genes from the thousands of genes in the data that contributes to a disease. This selection process is difficult due to many irrelevant genes, noisy genes, and the availability of the small number of samples compared to the huge number of genes (higher-dimensional data). In this study, we propose an iterative method based on hybrid genetic algorithms to select a near-optimal (smaller) subset of informative genes in classification of the microarray data. The experimental results show that our proposed method is capable in selecting the near-optimal subset to obtain better classification accuracies than other related previous works as well as four methods experimented in this work. Additionally, a list of informative genes in the best gene subsets is also presented for biological usage. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.