On the Performance of Variable Selection and Classification via Rank-Based Classifier

In high-dimensional gene expression data analysis, the accuracy and reliability of cancer classification and selection of important genes play a very crucial role. To identify these important genes and predict future outcomes (tumor vs. non-tumor), various methods have been proposed in the literature. But only few of them take into account correlation patterns and grouping effects among the genes. In this article, we propose a rank-based modification of the popular penalized logistic regression procedure based on a combination of ℓ 1 and ℓ 2 penalties capable of handling possible correlation among genes in different groups. While the ℓ 1 penalty maintains sparsity, the ℓ 2 penalty induces smoothness based on the information from the Laplacian matrix, which represents the correlation pattern among genes. We combined logistic regression with the BH-FDR (Benjamini and Hochberg false discovery rate) screening procedure and a newly developed rank-based selection method to come up with an optimal model retaining the important genes. Through simulation studies and real-world application to high-dimensional colon cancer gene expression data, we demonstrated that the proposed rank-based method outperforms such currently popular methods as lasso, adaptive lasso and elastic net when applied both to gene selection and classification.