Clustering in Conjunction with Wrapper Approach to Select Discriminatory Genes for Microarray Dataset Classification

With the advent of microarray technology, it is possible to measure gene expression levels of thousands of genes simultaneously. This helps us diagnose and classify some particular cancers directly using DNA microarray. High-dimensionality and small sample size of microarray datasets has made the task of classification difficult. These datasets contain a large number of redundant and irrelevant genes. For efficient classification of samples there is a need of selecting a smaller set of relevant and non-redundant genes. In this paper, we have proposed a two stage algorithm for finding a set of discriminatory genes responsible for classification of high dimensional microarray datasets. In the first stage redundancy is reduced by grouping correlated genes into clusters and selecting a representative gene from each cluster. Maximal information compression index is used to measure similarity between genes. In the second stage a wrapper based forward feature selection method is used to obtain a set of discriminatory genes for a given classifier. We have investigated three different techniques for clustering and four classifiers in our experiments. The proposed algorithm is tested on six well known publicly available datasets. Comparison with the other state-of-the-art methods show that our proposed algorithm is able to achieve better classification accuracy with less number of genes

Techniques for clustering gene expression data

Many clustering techniques have been proposed for the analysis of gene expression data obtained from microarray experiments. However, choice of suitable method(s) for a given experimental dataset is not straightforward. Common approaches do not translate well and fail to take account of the data profile. This review paper surveys state of the art applications which recognises these limitations and implements procedures to overcome them. It provides a framework for the evaluation of clustering in gene expression analyses. The nature of microarray data is discussed briefly. Selected examples are presented for the clustering methods considered

Optimizing Alzheimer's disease prediction using the nomadic people algorithm

The problem with using microarray technology to detect diseases is that not each is analytically necessary. The presence of non-essential gene data adds a computing load to the detection method. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to reduce the high-dimensional data size by determining the most critical genes involved in Alzheimer's disease progression. A study also aims to predict patients with a subset of genes that cause Alzheimer's disease. This paper uses feature selection techniques like information gain (IG) and a novel metaheuristic optimization technique based on a swarm’s algorithm derived from nomadic people’s behavior (NPO). This suggested method matches the structure of these individuals' lives movements and the search for new food sources. The method is mostly based on a multi-swarm method; there are several clans, each seeking the best foraging opportunities. Prediction is carried out after selecting the informative genes of the support vector machine (SVM), frequently used in a variety of prediction tasks. The accuracy of the prediction was used to evaluate the suggested system's performance. Its results indicate that the NPO algorithm with the SVM model returns high accuracy based on the gene subset from IG and NPO methods

Microarray Data Mining and Gene Regulatory Network Analysis

The novel molecular biological technology, microarray, makes it feasible to obtain quantitative measurements of expression of thousands of genes present in a biological sample simultaneously. Genome-wide expression data generated from this technology are promising to uncover the implicit, previously unknown biological knowledge. In this study, several problems about microarray data mining techniques were investigated, including feature(gene) selection, classifier genes identification, generation of reference genetic interaction network for non-model organisms and gene regulatory network reconstruction using time-series gene expression data. The limitations of most of the existing computational models employed to infer gene regulatory network lie in that they either suffer from low accuracy or computational complexity. To overcome such limitations, the following strategies were proposed to integrate bioinformatics data mining techniques with existing GRN inference algorithms, which enables the discovery of novel biological knowledge. An integrated statistical and machine learning (ISML) pipeline was developed for feature selection and classifier genes identification to solve the challenges of the curse of dimensionality problem as well as the huge search space. Using the selected classifier genes as seeds, a scale-up technique is applied to search through major databases of genetic interaction networks, metabolic pathways, etc. By curating relevant genes and blasting genomic sequences of non-model organisms against well-studied genetic model organisms, a reference gene regulatory network for less-studied organisms was built and used both as prior knowledge and model validation for GRN reconstructions. Networks of gene interactions were inferred using a Dynamic Bayesian Network (DBN) approach and were analyzed for elucidating the dynamics caused by perturbations. Our proposed pipelines were applied to investigate molecular mechanisms for chemical-induced reversible neurotoxicity

Individualized markers optimize class prediction of microarray data

BACKGROUND: Identification of molecular markers for the classification of microarray data is a challenging task. Despite the evident dissimilarity in various characteristics of biological samples belonging to the same category, most of the marker – selection and classification methods do not consider this variability. In general, feature selection methods aim at identifying a common set of genes whose combined expression profiles can accurately predict the category of all samples. Here, we argue that this simplified approach is often unable to capture the complexity of a disease phenotype and we propose an alternative method that takes into account the individuality of each patient-sample. RESULTS: Instead of using the same features for the classification of all samples, the proposed technique starts by creating a pool of informative gene-features. For each sample, the method selects a subset of these features whose expression profiles are most likely to accurately predict the sample's category. Different subsets are utilized for different samples and the outcomes are combined in a hierarchical framework for the classification of all samples. Moreover, this approach can innately identify subgroups of samples within a given class which share common feature sets thus highlighting the effect of individuality on gene expression. CONCLUSION: In addition to high classification accuracy, the proposed method offers a more individualized approach for the identification of biological markers, which may help in better understanding the molecular background of a disease and emphasize the need for more flexible medical interventions

Improving Feature Selection Techniques for Machine Learning

As a commonly used technique in data preprocessing for machine learning, feature selection identifies important features and removes irrelevant, redundant or noise features to reduce the dimensionality of feature space. It improves efficiency, accuracy and comprehensibility of the models built by learning algorithms. Feature selection techniques have been widely employed in a variety of applications, such as genomic analysis, information retrieval, and text categorization. Researchers have introduced many feature selection algorithms with different selection criteria. However, it has been discovered that no single criterion is best for all applications. We proposed a hybrid feature selection framework called based on genetic algorithms (GAs) that employs a target learning algorithm to evaluate features, a wrapper method. We call it hybrid genetic feature selection (HGFS) framework. The advantages of this approach include the ability to accommodate multiple feature selection criteria and find small subsets of features that perform well for the target algorithm. The experiments on genomic data demonstrate that ours is a robust and effective approach that can find subsets of features with higher classification accuracy and/or smaller size compared to each individual feature selection algorithm. A common characteristic of text categorization tasks is multi-label classification with a great number of features, which makes wrapper methods time-consuming and impractical. We proposed a simple filter (non-wrapper) approach called Relation Strength and Frequency Variance (RSFV) measure. The basic idea is that informative features are those that are highly correlated with the class and distribute most differently among all classes. The approach is compared with two well-known feature selection methods in the experiments on two standard text corpora. The experiments show that RSFV generate equal or better performance than the others in many cases

Supervised Clustering of Genes for Multi-Class Phenotype Classification

The paper presents the new approach to the supervised gene selection by means of gene clustering for the microarray data, which belong to more than two phenotypes (classes). The main distinction from the previous approaches, that are based on the splitting the multi-class task into several binary ones, is the application of the HUM (hypervolume under the manifold) score, that guides the search for the most discriminative gene clusters that simultaneously differentiate all the classes. The results of comparative analysis with other methods shows the advantages of our approach both in classification rate of the new samples and in the lower number of gene clusters. The application of our approach to a randomly permuted data shows that the identified structure is more than just a noise artifact