A novel parallel feature rank aggregation algorithm for gene selection applied to microarray data classification

Microarray data often comprises numerous genes, yet not all genes are relevant for predicting cancer. Feature selection becomes a crucial step to reduce the high dimensionality in these kinds of data. While no single feature selection method consistently outperforms others across diverse domains, the combination of multiple feature selectors or rankers tends to produce more effective results compared to relying on a single ranker alone. However, this approach can be computationally expensive, particularly when handling a large quantity of features. Hence, this paper presents a parallel feature rank aggregation that utilizes borda count as the rank aggregator. The concept of vertically partitioning the data along feature space was adapted to ease the parallel execution of the aggregation task. Features were selected based on the final aggregated rank list, and their classification performances were evaluated. The model’s execution time was also observed across multiple worker nodes of the cluster. The experiment was conducted on six benchmark microarray datasets. The results show the capability of the proposed distributed framework compared to the sequential version in all the cases. It also illustrated the improved accuracy performance of the proposed method and its ability to select a minimal number of genes.