A discernibility-based approach to feature selection for microarray data

Abstract

Feature selection has been used widely for a variety of data, yielding higher speeds and reduced computational cost for the classification process. However, it is in microarray datasets where its advantages become more evident and are more required. In this paper we present a novel approach to accomplish this based on the concept of discernibility that we introduce to depict how separated the classes of a dataset are. We develop and test two independent feature selection methods that follow this approach. The results of our experiments on four microarray datasets show that discernibility-based feature selection reduces the dimensionality of the datasets involved without compromising the performance of the classifiers.