Gene Expression Data Classification Using Support Vector Machine and Mutual Information-based Gene Selection

DNA microarray technology can monitor the expression levels of thousands of genes simultaneously during important biological processes and across collections of related samples. Knowledge gained through microarray data analysis is increasingly important as they are useful for phenotype classification of diseases. This paper presents an effective method for gene classification using Support Vector Machine (SVM). SVM is a supervised learning algorithm capable of solving complex classification problems. Mutual information (MI) between the genes and the class label is used for identifying the informative genes. The selected genes are utilized for training the SVM classifier and the testing ability is evaluated using Leave-one-Out Cross Validation (LOOCV) method. The performance of the proposed approach is evaluated using two cancer microarray datasets. From the simulation study it is observed that the proposed approach reduces the dimension of the input features by identifying the most informative gene subset and improve classification accuracy when compared to other approaches.