A New Multi-objective Hybrid Gene Selection Algorithm for Tumor Classification Based on Microarray Gene Expression Data

Abstract

Tumor classification based on microarray gene expression data is easy to fall into overfitting because such data are composed of many irrelevant, redundant, and noisy genes. Traditional gene selection methods cannot achieve satisfactory classification results. In this study, we propose a novel multi-target hybrid gene selection method named RMOGA (ReliefF Multi-Objective Genetic Algorithm), which aims to select a few genes and obtain good tumor recognition accuracy. RMOGA consists of two phases. Firstly, ReliefF is used to select the top 5% subset of genes from the original datasets. Secondly, a multi-objective genetic algorithm searches for the optimal gene subset from the gene subset obtained by the ReliefF method. To verify the validity of RMOGA, we conducted extensive experiments on 11 available microarray datasets and compared the proposed method with other previous methods. Two classical classifiers including Naive Bayes and Support Vector Machine were used to measure the classification performance of all comparison methods. Experimental results show that the RMOGA algorithm can yield significantly better results than previous state-of-the-art methods in terms of classification accuracy and the number of selected genes.