Mining and integrating reliable decision rules for imbalanced cancer gene expression data sets

There have been many skewed cancer gene expression datasets in the post-genomic era. Extraction of differential expression genes or construction of decision rules using these skewed datasets by traditional algorithms will seriously underestimate the performance of the minority class, leading to inaccurate diagnosis in clinical trails. This paper presents a skewed gene selection algorithm that introduces a weighted metric into the gene selection procedure. The extracted genes are paired as decision rules to distinguish both classes, with these decision rules then integrated into an ensemble learning framework by majority voting to recognize test examples; thus avoiding tedious data normalization and classifier construction. The mining and integrating of a few reliable decision rules gave higher or at least comparable classification performance than many traditional class imbalance learning algorithms on four benchmark imbalanced cancer gene expression datasets.