Classification of Gene Expression Profile Using Combinatory Method of Evolutionary Computation and Machine Learning

Abstract

The analysis of large amount of gene expression profiles, which became available by rapidly developed monitoring tools, is an important task in bioinformatics. The problem we address is the discrimination of gene expression profiles of different classes, such as cancerous/benign tissues.

Two subtasks in such problem, feature subset selection and inductive learning has critical effect on each other. In the wrapper’ approach, combinatorial search of feature subset is done with performance of inductive learning as search criteria. This paper compares few combinations of supervised learning and combinatorial search when used in the wrapper approach. Also an extended GA implementation is introduced, which utilizes Clonal selection, a data-driven selection method. It compares very well to standard GA. The analysis of the obtained classifier reveals synergistic effect of genes in discrimination of the profiles.