GECC: Gene Expression Based Ensemble Classification of Colon Samples

Gene expression deviates from its normal composition in case a patient has cancer. This variation can be used as an effective tool to find cancer. In this study, we propose a novel gene expressions based colon classification scheme (GECC) that exploits the variations in gene expressions for classifying colon gene samples into normal and malignant classes. Novelty of GECC is in two complementary ways. First, to cater overwhelmingly larger size of gene based data sets, various feature extraction strategies, like, chi-square, F-Score, principal component analysis (PCA) and minimum redundancy and maximum relevancy (mRMR) have been employed, which select discriminative genes amongst a set of genes. Second, a majority voting based ensemble of support vector machine (SVM) has been proposed to classify the given gene based samples. Previously, individual SVM models have been used for colon classification, however, their performance is limited. In this research study, we propose an SVM-ensemble based new approach for gene based classification of colon, wherein the individual SVM models are constructed through the learning of different SVM kernels, like, linear, polynomial, radial basis function (RBF), and sigmoid. The predicted results of individual models are combined through majority voting. In this way, the combined decision space becomes more discriminative. The proposed technique has been tested on four colon, and several other binary-class gene expression data sets, and improved performance has been achieved compared to previously reported gene based colon cancer detection techniques. The computational time required for the training and testing of 208 x 5,851 data set has been 591.01 and 0.019 s, respectively.