An Ensemble of Filters and Wrappers for Microarray Data Classification

Abstract

The development of microarray technology has supplied a large volume of data to many fields. The gene microarray analysis and classification have demonstrated an effective way for the effective diagnosis of diseases and cancers. In as much as the data achieving from microarray technology is very noisy and also has thousands of features, feature selection plays an important role in removing irrelevant and redundant features and also reducing computational complexity. There are two important approaches for gene selection in microarray data analysis, the filters and the wrappers. To select a concise subset of informative genes, we introduce a hybrid feature selection which combines two approaches. The fact of the matter is that candidate’s features are first selected from the original set via several effective filters. The candidate feature set is further refined by more accurate wrappers. Thus, we can take advantage of both the filters and wrappers. Experimental results based on 11 microarray datasets show that our mechanism can be effected with a smaller feature set. Moreover, these feature subsets can be obtained in a reasonable time.