Z.L.: Hybrid Methods to Select Informative Gene Sets in Microarray Data Classification

Abstract. One of the key applications of microarray studies is to se-lect and classify gene expression profiles of cancer and normal subjects. In this study, two hybrid approaches–genetic algorithm with decision tree (GADT) and genetic algorithm with neural network (GANN)–are utilized to select optimal gene sets which contribute to the highest classi-fication accuracy. Two benchmark microarray datasets were tested, and the most significant disease related genes have been identified. Further-more, the selected gene sets achieved comparably high sample classifica-tion accuracy (96.79 % and 94.92 % in colon cancer dataset, 98.67 % and 98.05 % in leukemia dataset) compared with those obtained by mRMR algorithm. The study results indicate that these two hybrid methods are able to select disease related genes and improve classification accuracy.