Background and Objectives: This paper examines the accuracy and efficiency (time complexity) of high performance genetic data feature selection and classification algorithms for colon cancer diagnosis. The need for this research derives from the urgent and increasing need for accurate and efficient algorithms. Colon cancer is a leading cause of death worldwide, hence it is vitally important for the cancer tissues to be expertly identified and classified in a rapid and timely manner, to assure both a fast detection of the disease and to expedite the drug discovery process.
Methods: In this research, a three-phase approach was proposed and implemented: Phases One and Two examined the feature selection algorithms and classification algorithms employed separately, and Phase Three examined the performance of the combination of these.
Results: It was found from Phase One that the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm performed best with the colon dataset as a feature selection (29 genes selected) and from Phase Two that the Sup- port Vector Machine (SVM) algorithm outperformed other classifications, with an accuracy of almost 86%. It was also found from Phase Three that the combined use of PSO and SVM surpassed other algorithms in accuracy and performance, and was faster in terms of time analysis (94%).
Conclusions: It is concluded that applying feature selection algorithms prior to classification algorithms results in better accuracy than when the latter are applied alone. This conclusion is important and significant to industry and society
