Artificial Neural Network Classification of High Dimensional Data with Novel Optimization Approach of Dimension Reduction

Classification of high dimensional data is a very crucial task in bioinformatics. Cancer classification of the microarray is a typical application of machine learning due to the large numbers of genes. Feature (genes) selection and classification with computational intelligent techniques play an important role in diagnosis and prediction of disease in the microarray. Artificial neural networks (ANN) is an artificial intelligence technique for classifying, image processing and predicting the data. This paper evaluates the performance of ANN classifier using six different hybrid feature selection techniques, for gene selection of microarray data. These hybrid techniques use Independent component analysis (ICA), as an extraction technique, popular filter techniques and bio-inspired algorithm for optimization of the ICA feature vector. Five binary gene expression microarray datasets are used to compare the performance of these techniques and determine how these techniques improve the performance of ANN classifier. These techniques can be extremely useful in feature selection because they achieve the highest classification accuracy along with the lowest average number of selected genes. Furthermore, to check the significant difference between these different algorithms a statistical hypothesis test was employed with a certain level of confidence. The experimental result shows that a combination of ICA with genetic bee colony algorithm shows superior performance as it heuristically removes non-contributing features to improve the performance of classifiers.