Selection of interdependent genes via dynamic relevance analysis for cancer diagnosis

Microarray analysis is widely accepted for human cancer diagnosis and classification. However the high dimensionality of microarray data poses a great challenge to classification. Gene selection plays a key role in identifying salient genes from thousands of genes in microarray data that can directly contribute to the symptom of disease. Although various excellent selection methods are currently available, one common problem of these methods is that genes which have strong discriminatory power as a group but are weak as individuals will be discarded. In this paper, a new gene selection method is proposed for cancer diagnosis and classification by retaining useful intrinsic groups of interdependent genes. The primary characteristic of this method is that the relevance between each gene and target will be dynamically updated when a new gene is selected. The effectiveness of our method is validated by experiments on six publicly available microarray data sets. Experimental results show that the classification performance and enrichment score achieved by our proposed method is better than those of other selection methods.