A new combined filter-wrapper framework for gene subset selection with specialized genetic operators

Abstract

This paper introduces a new combined filter-wrapper gene subset selection approach where a Genetic Algorithm (GA) is combined with Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA). This LDA-based GA algorithm has the major characteristic that the GA uses not only a LDA classifier in its fitness function, but also LDA's discriminant coefficients in its dedicated crossover and mutation operators. This paper studies the effect of these informed operators on the evolutionary process. The proposed algorithm is assessed on a several well-known datasets from the literature and compared with recent state of art algorithms. The results obtained show that our filter-wrapper approach obtains globally high classification accuracies with very small number of genes to those obtained by other methods. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.