Knowledge Discovery in Gene Expression Data via Evolutionary Algorithms

Methods currently used for micro-array data classification aim to select a minimum subset of features, namely a predictor, that is necessary to construct a classifier of best accuracy. Although effective, they lack in facing the primary goal of domain experts that are interested in detecting different groups of biologically relevant markers. In this paper, we present and test a framework which aims to provide different subsets of relevant genes. It considers initial gene filtering to define a set of feature spaces each of ones is further refined by taking advantage from a genetic algorithm. Experiments show that the overall process results in a certain number of predictors with high classification accuracy. Compared to state-of-art feature selection algorithms, the proposed framework consistently generates better feature subsets and keeps improving the quality of selected subsets in terms of accuracy and size.