Feature Selection Approach based on Firefly Algorithm and Chi-square

Dimensionality problem is a well-known challenging issue for most classifiers in which datasets have unbalanced number of samples and features. Features may contain unreliable data which may lead the classification process to produce undesirable results. Feature selection approach is considered a solution for this kind of problems. In this paperan enhanced firefly algorithm is proposed to serve as a feature selection solution for reducing dimensionality and picking the most informative features to be used in classification. The main purpose of the proposedmodel is to improve the classification accuracy through using the selected features produced from the model, thus classification errors will decrease. Modeling firefly in this research appears through simulating firefly position by cell chi-square value which is changed after every move, and simulating firefly intensity by calculating a set of different fitness functionsas a weight for each feature. K-nearest neighbor and Discriminant analysis are used as classifiers to test the proposed firefly algorithm in selecting features. Experimental results showed that the proposed enhanced algorithmbased on firefly algorithm with chi-square and different fitness functions can provide better results than others. Results showed that reduction of dataset is useful for gaining higher accuracy in classification

Mutable composite firefly algorithm for gene selection in microarray based cancer classification

Cancer classification is critical due to the strenuous effort required in cancer treatment and the rising cancer mortality rate. Recent trends with high throughput technologies have led to discoveries in terms of biomarkers that successfully contributed to cancerrelated issues. A computational approach for gene selection based on microarray data analysis has been applied in many cancer classification problems. However, the existing hybrid approaches with metaheuristic optimization algorithms in feature selection (specifically in gene selection) are not generalized enough to efficiently classify most cancer microarray data while maintaining a small set of genes. This leads to the classification accuracy and genes subset size problem. Hence, this study proposed to modify the Firefly Algorithm (FA) along with the Correlation-based Feature Selection (CFS) filter for the gene selection task. An improved FA was proposed to overcome FA slow convergence by generating mutable size solutions for the firefly population. In addition, a composite position update strategy was designed for the mutable size solutions. The proposed strategy was to balance FA exploration and exploitation in order to address the local optima problem. The proposed hybrid algorithm known as CFS-Mutable Composite Firefly Algorithm (CFS-MCFA) was evaluated on cancer microarray data for biomarker selection along with the deployment of Support Vector Machine (SVM) as the classifier. Evaluation was performed based on two metrics: classification accuracy and size of feature set. The results showed that the CFS-MCFA-SVM algorithm outperforms benchmark methods in terms of classification accuracy and genes subset size. In particular, 100 percent accuracy was achieved on all four datasets and with only a few biomarkers (between one and four). This result indicates that the proposed algorithm is one of the competitive alternatives in feature selection, which later contributes to the analysis of microarray data

Hybrid feature selection of breast cancer gene expression microarray data based on metaheuristic methods: a comprehensive review

Breast cancer (BC) remains the most dominant cancer among women worldwide. Numerous BC gene expression microarray-based studies have been employed in cancer classification and prognosis. The availability of gene expression microarray data together with advanced classification methods has enabled accurate and precise classification. Nevertheless, the microarray datasets suffer from a large number of gene expression levels, limited sample size, and irrelevant features. Additionally, datasets are often asymmetrical, where the number of samples from different classes is not balanced. These limitations make it difficult to determine the actual features that contribute to the existence of cancer classification in the gene expression profiles. Various accurate feature selection methods exist, and they are being widely applied. The objective of feature selection is to search for a relevant, discriminant feature subset from the basic feature space. In this review, we aim to compile and review the latest hybrid feature selection methods based on bio-inspired metaheuristic methods and wrapper methods for the classification of BC and other types of cancer

PMP-SVM: A Hybrid Approach for effective Cancer Diagnosis using Feature Selection and Optimization

Cancer disease is becoming a prominent factor in increasing the death ration over the world due to the late diagnosis. Machine Learning (ML) is playing a vital role in providing computer aided diagnosis models for early diagnosis of cancer. For the diagnosis process the microarray data has its own place. Microarray data contain the genetic information of a patient with a large number of dimensions such as genes with a small sample such as patient details. If the microarray is directly taken without reducing the dimension as the input to any ML model for classification, then Small Sample Size is the resulting issue. So, size of the microarray data needs to be reduces by using either of dimensionality reduction technique or the feature selection technique to increase the model’s performance. In this work, proposed a hybrid model using Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Maximum Relevance Minimum Redundancy (MRMR), Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and  Support Vector Machine (SVM) for cancer diagnosis. PCA and MRMR is used for feature selection and PSO is applied to get the optimized feature set. Finally, SVM is applied as the classification model. The proposed model is evaluated against multiple cancer microarray datasets to measure the performance in terms of accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 score. Result shows that proposed model performs better than existing state of art model

Nature Inspired Evolutionary Swarm Optimizers for Biomedical Image and Signal Processing -- A Systematic Review

The challenge of finding a global optimum in a solution search space with limited resources and higher accuracy has given rise to several optimization algorithms. Generally, the gradient-based optimizers converge to the global solution very accurately, but they often require a large number of iterations to find the solution. Researchers took inspiration from different natural phenomena and behaviours of many living organisms to develop algorithms that can solve optimization problems much quicker with high accuracy. These algorithms are called nature-inspired meta-heuristic optimization algorithms. These can be used for denoising signals, updating weights in a deep neural network, and many other cases. In the state-of-the-art, there are no systematic reviews available that have discussed the applications of nature-inspired algorithms on biomedical signal processing. The paper solves that gap by discussing the applications of such algorithms in biomedical signal processing and also provides an updated survey of the application of these algorithms in biomedical image processing. The paper reviews 28 latest peer-reviewed relevant articles and 26 nature-inspired algorithms and segregates them into thoroughly explored, lesser explored and unexplored categories intending to help readers understand the reliability and exploration stage of each of these algorithms

An Optimisation-Driven Prediction Method for Automated Diagnosis and Prognosis

open access articleThis article presents a novel hybrid classification paradigm for medical diagnoses and prognoses prediction. The core mechanism of the proposed method relies on a centroid classification algorithm whose logic is exploited to formulate the classification task as a real-valued optimisation problem. A novel metaheuristic combining the algorithmic structure of Swarm Intelligence optimisers with the probabilistic search models of Estimation of Distribution Algorithms is designed to optimise such a problem, thus leading to high-accuracy predictions. This method is tested over 11 medical datasets and compared against 14 cherry-picked classification algorithms. Results show that the proposed approach is competitive and superior to the state-of-the-art on several occasions

A Survey of Feature Selection Strategies for DNA Microarray Classification

Classification tasks are difficult and challenging in the bioinformatics field, that used to predict or diagnose patients at an early stage of disease by utilizing DNA microarray technology. However, crucial characteristics of DNA microarray technology are a large number of features and small sample sizes, which means the technology confronts a "dimensional curse" in its classification tasks because of the high computational execution needed and the discovery of biomarkers difficult. To reduce the dimensionality of features to find the significant features that can employ feature selection algorithms and not affect the performance of classification tasks. Feature selection helps decrease computational time by removing irrelevant and redundant features from the data. The study aims to briefly survey popular feature selection methods for classifying DNA microarray technology, such as filters, wrappers, embedded, and hybrid approaches. Furthermore, this study describes the steps of the feature selection process used to accomplish classification tasks and their relationships to other components such as datasets, cross-validation, and classifier algorithms. In the case study, we chose four different methods of feature selection on two-DNA microarray datasets to evaluate and discuss their performances, namely classification accuracy, stability, and the subset size of selected features. Keywords: Brief survey; DNA microarray data; feature selection; filter methods; wrapper methods; embedded methods; and hybrid methods. DOI: 10.7176/CEIS/14-2-01 Publication date:March 31st 202

Identification of pathway and gene markers using enhanced directed random walk for multiclass cancer expression data

Cancer markers play a significant role in the diagnosis of the origin of cancers and in the detection of cancers from initial treatments. This is a challenging task owing to the heterogeneity nature of cancers. Identification of these markers could help in improving the survival rate of cancer patients, in which dedicated treatment can be provided according to the diagnosis or even prevention. Previous investigations show that the use of pathway topology information could help in the detection of cancer markers from gene expression. Such analysis reduces its complexity from thousands of genes to a few hundreds of pathways. However, most of the existing methods group different cancer subtypes into just disease samples, and consider all pathways contribute equally in the analysis process. Meanwhile, the interaction between multiple genes and the genes with missing edges has been ignored in several other methods, and hence could lead to the poor performance of the identification of cancer markers from gene expression. Thus, this research proposes enhanced directed random walk to identify pathway and gene markers for multiclass cancer gene expression data. Firstly, an improved pathway selection with analysis of variances (ANOVA) that enables the consideration of multiple cancer subtypes is performed, and subsequently the integration of k-mean clustering and average silhouette method in the directed random walk that considers the interaction of multiple genes is also conducted. The proposed methods are tested on benchmark gene expression datasets (breast, lung, and skin cancers) and biological pathways. The performance of the proposed methods is then measured and compared in terms of classification accuracy and area under the receiver operating characteristics curve (AUC). The results indicate that the proposed methods are able to identify a list of pathway and gene markers from the datasets with better classification accuracy and AUC. The proposed methods have improved the classification performance in the range of between 1% and 35% compared with existing methods. Cell cycle and p53 signaling pathway were found significantly associated with breast, lung, and skin cancers, while the cell cycle was highly enriched with squamous cell carcinoma and adenocarcinoma

On the role of metaheuristic optimization in bioinformatics

Metaheuristic algorithms are employed to solve complex and large-scale optimization problems in many different fields, from transportation and smart cities to finance. This paper discusses how metaheuristic algorithms are being applied to solve different optimization problems in the area of bioinformatics. While the text provides references to many optimization problems in the area, it focuses on those that have attracted more interest from the optimization community. Among the problems analyzed, the paper discusses in more detail the molecular docking problem, the protein structure prediction, phylogenetic inference, and different string problems. In addition, references to other relevant optimization problems are also given, including those related to medical imaging or gene selection for classification. From the previous analysis, the paper generates insights on research opportunities for the Operations Research and Computer Science communities in the field of bioinformatics