Improving classification of microarray data using prototype-based feature selection

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of improving accuracy in the machine-learning task of classification from microarray data. One of the known issues specifically related to microarray data is the large number of inputs (genes) versus the small number of available samples (conditions). A promising direction of research to decrease the generalization error of classification algorithms is to perform gene selection so as to identify those genes which are potentially most relevant for the classification. Classical feature selection methods are based on direct statistical methods. We present a reduction algorithm based on the notion of prototypegene. Each prototype represents a set of similar gene according to a given clustering method. We present experimental evidence of the usefulness of combining prototype-based feature selection with statistical gene selection methods for the task of classifying adenocarcinoma from gene expressions.