An empirical comparison of feature reduction methods in the context of microarray data classification

• Authors: Hans A. Kestler;Christoph Müssel
• Venue: ANNPR'06 Proceedings of the Second international conference on Artificial Neural Networks in Pattern Recognition
• Year: 2006

The differentiation between cancerous and benign processes in the body often poses a difficult diagnostic problem in the clinical setting while being of major importance for the treatment of patients. Measuring the expression of a large number of genes with DNA microarrays may serve this purpose. While the expression level of several thousands of genes can be measured in a single experiment, only a few dozens of experiments are normally carried out, leading to data sets of very high dimensionality and low cardinality. In this situation, feature reduction techniques capable of reducing the dimensionality of data are essential for building predictive tools based on classification. Methods and Data: We compare the popular feature selection and classification method PAM (Tibshirani et al.) to several other methods. Feature reduction and feature ranking methods, such as Random Projection, Random Feature Selection, Area under the ROC curve and PCA are applied. We employ these together with the classification component of PAM, Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA), a Nearest Prototype (NP) classifier and linear support vector machines (SVMs). We apply these methods to three publicly available linearly separable gene expression data sets of varying cardinality and dimensionality. Results and Conclusions: In our experiments with the gene expression data we could not discover a clearly superior algorithm, instead most surprisingly we found that feature reduction using random projections or selections performed often equally well.