The effect of feature normalization methods in radiomics

OBJECTIVES: In radiomics, different feature normalization methods, such as z-Score or Min-Max, are currently utilized, but their specific impact on the model is unclear. We aimed to measure their effect on the predictive performance and the feature selection. METHODS: We employed fifteen publicly available radiomics datasets to compare seven normalization methods. Using four feature selection and classifier methods, we used cross-validation to measure the area under the curve (AUC) of the resulting models, the agreement of selected features, and the model calibration. In addition, we assessed whether normalization before cross-validation introduces bias. RESULTS: On average, the difference between the normalization methods was relatively small, with a gain of at most + 0.012 in AUC when comparing the z-Score (mean AUC: 0.707 ± 0.102) to no normalization (mean AUC: 0.719 ± 0.107). However, on some datasets, the difference reached + 0.051. The z-Score performed best, while the tanh transformation showed the worst performance and even decreased the overall predictive performance. While quantile transformation performed, on average, slightly worse than the z-Score, it outperformed all other methods on one out of three datasets. The agreement between the features selected by different normalization methods was only mild, reaching at most 62%. Applying the normalization before cross-validation did not introduce significant bias. CONCLUSION: The choice of the feature normalization method influenced the predictive performance but depended strongly on the dataset. It strongly impacted the set of selected features. CRITICAL RELEVANCE STATEMENT: Feature normalization plays a crucial role in the preprocessing and influences the predictive performance and the selected features, complicating feature interpretation. KEY POINTS: • The impact of feature normalization methods on radiomic models was measured. • Normalization methods performed similarly on average, but differed more strongly on some datasets. • Different methods led to different sets of selected features, impeding feature interpretation. • Model calibration was not largely affected by the normalization method.