Gene selection for cancer classification using a hybrid of univariate and multivariate feature selection methods

Abstract: Various approaches to gene selection for cancer classification based on microarray data can be found in the literature and they may be grouped into two categories: univariate methods and multivariate methods. Univariate methods look at each gene in the data in isolation from others. They measure the contribution of a particular gene to the classification without considering the presence of the other genes. In contrast, multivariate methods measure the relative contribution of a gene to the classification by taking the other genes in the data into consideration. Multivariate methods select fewer genes in general. However, the selection process of multivariate methods may be sensitive to the presence of irrelevant genes, noises in the expression and outliers in the training data. At the same time, the computational cost of multivariate methods is high. To overcome the disadvantages of the two types of approaches, we propose a hybrid method to obtain gene sets that are small and highly discriminative. We devise our hybrid method from the univariate Maximum Likelihood method (LIK) and the multivariate Recursive Feature Elimination method (RFE). We analyze the properties of these methods and systematically test the effectiveness of our proposed method on two cancer microarray datasets. Our experiments on a leukemia dataset and a small, round blue cell tumors dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our hybrid method. It is able to discover sets consisting of fewer genes than those reported in the literature and at the same time achieve the same or better prediction accuracy.