Gene Ranking from Microarray Data for Cancer Classification : A Machine Learning Approach

Abstract

Traditional gene selection methods often select the top–ranked genes according to their individual discriminative power. We propose to apply feature evaluation measure broadly used in the machine learning field and not so popular in the DNA microarray field. Besides, the application of sequential gene subset selection approaches is included. In our study, we propose some well-known criteria (filters and wrappers) to rank attributes, and a greedy search procedure combined with three subset evaluation measures. Two completely different machine learning classifiers are applied to perform the class prediction. The comparison is performed on two well–known DNA microarray data sets. We notice that most of the top-ranked genes appear in the list of relevant–informative genes detected by previous studies over these data sets.