Dengue Fever Classification Using Gene Expression Data: A PSO Based Artificial Neural Network Approach

A mosquito borne pathogen called Dengue virus (DENV) has been emerged as one of the most fatal threats in the recent time. Infections can be in two main forms, namely the DF (Dengue Fever), and DHF (Dengue Hemorrhagic Fever). An efficient detection method for both fever types turns out to be a significant task. Thus, in the present work, a novel application of Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) trained Artificial Neural Network (ANN) has been employed to separate the patients having Dengue fevers from those who are recovering from it or do not have DF. The ANN's input weight vector are optimized using PSO to achieve the expected accuracy and to avoid premature convergence toward the local optima. Therefore, a gene expression data (GDS5093 dataset) available publicly is used. The dataset contains gene expression data for DF, DHF, convalescent and healthy control patients of total 56 subjects. Greedy forward selection method has been applied to select most promising genes to identify the DF, DHF and normal (either convalescent or healthy controlled) patients. The proposed system performance was compared to the multilayer perceptron feed-forward neural network (MLP-FFN) classifier. Results proved the dominance of the proposed method with achieved accuracy of 90.91 %.