Feature Selection in Cancer Genetics using Hybrid Soft Computing

Microarray databases are the most frequently used datasets for cancer analytics. Microarray databases are characterized by the presence of a very large number of genes, which exceeds the very little number of samples. So, the feature set accumulates the curse of dimensionality. Therefore, selecting a small subset of genes among thousands of genes in microarray data can potentially increase the accuracy for the classification of cancer. Many approaches, from the field of classical machine learning and soft computing, have been used to address the issue of feature selection and feature extraction for better classifications and clustering accuracy. The research outlined in this paper strives to look at a two-stage approach using minimum Redundancy Maximum Relevancy (mRMR), a feature ranking framework as the first stage followed by a hybrid genetic algorithm in the second stage that works on the features ranked by the mRMR. The proposed method is aimed to select the optimal feature subsets for better classification results in binary and multi class datasets to compensate for the curse of dimensionality in microarray datasets. The classifiers used to test the two-stage proposition are SVM, Naive-Bayes, Linear Discriminant Analysis, decision trees and random forest classifiers. The experimental results show that the gene subset selected by the mRMR-GA pipeline gives good results.