Machine learning models to search relevant genetic signatures in clinical context

Clinicians are interested in the estimation of robust and relevant genetic signatures from gene sequencing data. Many machine learning approaches have been proposed trying to address well-known issues of this complex task (feature or gene selection, classification or model selection, and prediction assessment). Addressing this problem often requires a deep knowledge of these methods and some of them demand high computational resources that may not be affordable. In this paper, an exhaustive study that includes different types of feature selection methods and classifiers is presented, providing clinicians an useful insight of the most suitable methods for this purpose. Predictions assessment is performed using a bootstrap cross-validation strategy as an honest validation scheme. The results of this study for six benchmark datasets show that filter or embedded methods are preferred, in general, to wrapper methods according to their better statistical significant results, in terms of accuracy, and lower demand for computational resources.