Unsupervised feature selection algorithm for multiclass cancer classification of gene expression RNA-Seq data

This paper presents a Grouping Genetic Algorithm (GGA) to solve a maximally diverse grouping problem. It has been applied for the classification of an unbalanced database of 801 samples of gene expression RNA-Seq data in 5 types of cancer. The samples are composed by 20,531 genes. GGA extracts several groups of genes that achieve high accuracy in multiple classification. Accuracy has been evaluated by an Extreme Learning Machine algorithm and was found to be slightly higher in balanced databases than in unbalanced ones. The final classification decision has been made through a weighted majority vote system between the groups of features. The proposed algorithm finally selects 49 genes to classify samples with an average accuracy of 98.81% and a standard deviation of 0.0174.