Incremental Search for Informative Gene Selection in Cancer Classification

Abstract

Although numerous methods of using microarray data analysis for classification have been reported, there is space in the field of cancer classification for new inventions in terms of informative gene selection. This study introduces a new incremental search-based gene selection approach for cancer classification. The strength of wrappers in determining relevant genes in a gene pool can be increased as they evaluate each possible gene’s subset. Nevertheless, the searching algorithms play a major role in gene’s subset selection. Hence, there is the possibility of finding more informative genes with incremental application. Thus, we introduce an approach which utilizes two searching algorithms in gene’s subset selection. The approach was efficient enough to classify five out of six microarray datasets with 100% accuracy using only a few biomarkers while the rest classified with only one misclassification.