Perturbation and candidate analysis to combat overfitting of gene expression microarray data

Analysis of gene expression microarray datasets presents the high risk of over-fitting (spurious patterns) because of their feature-rich but case-poor nature. This paper describes our ongoing efforts to develop a method to combat over-fitting and determine the strongest signal in the dataset. A GA-SVM hybrid along with Gaussian noise (manual noise gain) is used to discover feature sets of minimal size that accurately classifies the cases under cross-validation. Initial results on a colorectal cancer dataset shows that the strongest signal (modest number of candidates) can be found by a binary search.