Development of two-stage SVM-RFE gene selection strategy for microarray expression data analysis.
Extracting a subset of informative genes from microarray expression data is a critical data preparation step in cancer classification and other biological function analyses. Though many algorithms have been developed, the Support Vector Machine - Recursive Feature Elimination (SVM-RFE) algorithm is one of the best gene feature selection algorithms. It assumes that a smaller "filter-out" factor in the SVM-RFE, which results in a smaller number of gene features eliminated in each recursion, should lead to extraction of a better gene subset. Because the SVM-RFE is highly sensitive to the "filter-out" factor, our simulations have shown that this assumption is not always correct and that the SVM-RFE is an unstable algorithm. To select a set of key gene features for reliable prediction of cancer types or subtypes and other applications, a new two-stage SVM-RFE algorithm has been developed. It is designed to effectively eliminate most of the irrelevant, redundant and noisy genes while keeping information loss small at the first stage. A fine selection for the final gene subset is then performed at the second stage. The two-stage SVM-RFE overcomes the instability problem of the SVM-RFE to achieve better algorithm utility. We have demonstrated that the two-stage SVM-RFE is significantly more accurate and more reliable than the SVM-RFE and three correlation-based methods based on our analysis of three publicly available microarray expression datasets. Furthermore, the two-stage SVM-RFE is computationally efficient because its time complexity is O(d*log(2)d}, where d is the size of the original gene set.
Secure Computing Corporation, GA 30022, USA. tyczjs@yahoo.com
Yuchun
Y
Tang
Yan-Qing
YQ
Zhang
Zhen
Z
Huang
D000465:Algorithms; D001185:Artificial Intelligence; D014408:Biomarkers, Tumor / Q000378:metabolism*; D003936:Diagnosis, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods; D020869:Gene Expression Profiling / Q000379:methods*; D006801:Humans; D009363:Neoplasm Proteins / Q000378:metabolism*; D009369:Neoplasms / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000378:metabolism*; D020411:Oligonucleotide Array Sequence Analysis / Q000379:methods*; D010363:Pattern Recognition, Automated / Q000379:methods*
D014408:Biomarkers, Tumor; D009363:Neoplasm Proteins