Gene Selection for Microarray Cancer Data Classification by a Novel Rule-Based Algorithm

Due to the disproportionate difference between the number of genes and samples, microarray data analysis is considered an extremely difficult task in sample classification. Feature selection mitigates this problem by removing irrelevant and redundant genes from data. In this paper, we propose a new methodology for feature selection that aims to detect relevant, non-redundant and interacting genes by analysing the feature value space instead of the feature space. Following this methodology, we also propose a new feature selection algorithm, namely Pavicd (Probabilistic Attribute-Value for Class Distinction). Experiments in fourteen microarray cancer datasets reveal that Pavicd obtains the best performance in terms of running time and classification accuracy when using Ripper-k and C4.5 as classifiers. When using SVM (Support Vector Machine), the Gbc (Genetic Bee Colony) wrapper algorithm gets the best results. However, Pavicd is significantly faster.