An ensemble feature selection method for biomarker discovery

Feature selection in Liquid Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry (LC-MS)-based metabolomics data (biomarker discovery) have become an important topic for machine learning researchers. High dimensionality and small sample size of LC-MS data make feature selection a challenging task. The goal of biomarker discovery is to select the few most discriminative features among a large number of irreverent ones. To improve the reliability of the discovered biomarkers, we use an ensemble-based approach. Ensemble learning can improve the accuracy of feature selection by combining multiple algorithms that have complementary information. In this paper, we propose an ensemble approach to combine the results of filter-based feature selection methods. To evaluate the proposed approach, we compared it to two commonly used methods, t-test and PLS-DA, using a real data set.