Simultaneous Optimization of Gene Selection and Tumor Classification Using Intelligent Genetic Algorithm and Support Vector Machine

Microarray gene expression profiling technology is one of the most important research topics in clinical diagnosis of disease. Given thousands of genes, only a small number of them show strong correlation with a certain phenotype. To identify such an optimal subset from thousands of genes is intractable, which plays a crucial role when classify multiple-class genes express models from tumor samples. This paper proposes an efficient classifier design method to simultaneously select the most relevant genes using an intelligent genetic algorithm (IGA) and design an accurate classifier using Support Vector Machine (SVM). IGA with an intelligent crossover operation based on orthogonal experimental design can efficiently solve large-scale parameter optimization problems. Therefore, the parameters of SVM as well as the binary parameters for gene selection are all encoded in a chromosome to achieve simultaneous optimization of gene selection and the associated SVM for accurate tumor classification. The effectiveness of the proposed method IGA/SVM is evaluated using four benchmark datasets. It is shown by computer simulation that IGA/SVM performs better than the existing method in terms of classification accuracy.