Inge Jonassen

Xiaokang Zhang, Inge Jonassen

Univariate and multivariate feature selection methods can be used for biomarker discovery in analysis of toxicant exposure. Among the univariate methods, differential expression analysis (DEA) is often applied for its simplicity and interpretability. A characteristic of methods for DEA is that they treat genes individually, disregarding the correlation that exists between them. On the other hand, some multivariate feature selection methods are proposed for biomarker discovery. Provided with various biomarker discovery methods, how to choose the most suitable method for a specific dataset becomes a problem. In this paper, we present a framework for comparison of potential biomarker discovery methods: three methods that stem from different theories are compared by how stable they are and how well they can improve the classification accuracy. The three methods we have considered are: Significance Analysis of Microarrays (SAM) which identifies the differentially expressed genes; minimum Redundancy Maximum Relevance (mRMR) based on information theory; and Characteristic Direction (GeoDE) inspired by a graphical perspective. Tested on the gene expression data from two experiments exposing the cod fish to two different toxicants (MeHg and PCB 153), different methods stand out in different cases, so a decision upon the most suitable method should be made based on the dataset under study and the research interest.

Xiaokang Zhang, Inge Jonassen

Ensemble learning that can be used to combine the predictions from multiple learners has been widely applied in pattern recognition, and has been reported to be more robust and accurate than the individual learners. This ensemble logic has recently also been more applied in feature selection. There are basically two strategies for ensemble feature selection, namely data perturbation and function perturbation. Data perturbation performs feature selection on data subsets sampled from the original dataset and then selects the features consistently ranked highly across those data subsets. This has been found to improve both the stability of the selector and the prediction accuracy for a classifier. Function perturbation frees the user from having to decide on the most appropriate selector for any given situation and works by aggregating multiple selectors. This has been found to maintain or improve classification performance. Here we propose a framework, EFSIS, combining these two strategies. Empirical results indicate that EFSIS gives both high prediction accuracy and stability.