Stability of gene selection methods for multiclass clssification

A big problem in applying DNA microarrays for classification is dimension of the dataset. Recently we proposed a gene selection method based on Partial Least Squares (PLS) for searching best genes for classification. The new idea is to use PLS not only as multiclass approach, but to construct more binary selections that use one versus rest and one versus one approaches. Ranked gene lists are highly instable in the sense, that a small change of the data set often leads to big change of the obtained ordered list. In this article, we take a look at the assessment of stability of our approaches. We compare the variability of the obtained ordered lists from proposed methods with well known Recursive Feature Elimination (RFE) method and classical t-test method. This paper focuses on effective identification of informative genes. As a result, a new strategy to find small subset of significant genes is designed. Our results on real cancer data show that our approach has very high accuracy rate for different combinations of classification methods giving in the same time very stable feature rankings