A hybrid BPSO-CGA approach for gene selection and classification of microarray data.

Microarray analysis promises to detect variations in gene expressions, and changes in the transcription rates of an entire genome in vivo. Microarray gene expression profiles indicate the relative abundance of mRNA corresponding to the genes. The selection of relevant genes from microarray data poses a formidable challenge to researchers due to the high-dimensionality of features, multiclass categories being involved, and the usually small sample size. A classification process is often employed which decreases the dimensionality of the microarray data. In order to correctly analyze microarray data, the goal is to find an optimal subset of features (genes) which adequately represents the original set of features. A hybrid method of binary particle swarm optimization (BPSO) and a combat genetic algorithm (CGA) is to perform the microarray data selection. The K-nearest neighbor (K-NN) method with leave-one-out cross-validation (LOOCV) served as a classifier. The proposed BPSO-CGA approach is compared to ten microarray data sets from the literature. The experimental results indicate that the proposed method not only effectively reduce the number of genes expression level, but also achieves a low classification error rate.