Novel machine learning approach for classification of high-dimensional microarray data

Independent component analysis (ICA) is a powerful concept for reducing the dimension of big data in many applications. It has been used for the feature extraction of microarray gene expression data in numerous works. One of the merits of ICA is that a number of extracted features are always equal to the number of samples. When ICA is applied to microarray data, whenever, it faces the challenges of how to find the best subset of genes (features) from extracted features. To resolve this problem, in this paper, we propose a new (artificial bee colony) ABC-based feature selection approach for microarray data. Our approach is based on two stages: ICA-based extraction approach to reduce the size of data and ABC-based wrapper approach to optimize the reduced feature vectors. To validate our proposed approach, extensive experiments were conducted to compare the performance of ICA + ABC with the results obtained from recently published and other previously suggested methods of gene selection for Naïve Bayes (NB) classifier. To compare the performance of the proposed approach with other algorithms, a statistical hypothesis test was employed with six benchmark cancer classification datasets of the microarray. The experimental result shows that the proposed approach demonstrates an improvement over all the algorithms for NB classifier with a certain level of significance.