On the classification of microarray gene-expression data

Abstract

We consider the classification of microarray gene-expression data. First, attention is given to the supervised case, where the tissue samples are classified with respect to a number of predefined classes and the intent is to assign a new unclassified tissue to one of these classes. The problems of forming a classifier and estimating its error rate are addressed in the context of there being a relatively small number of observations (tissue samples) compared to the number of variables (that is, the genes, which can number in the tens of thousands). We then proceed to the unsupervised case and consider the clustering of the tissue samples and also the clustering of the gene profiles. Both problems can be viewed as being non-standard ones in statistics and we address some of the key issues involved. The focus is on the use of mixture models to effect the clustering for both problems.