Gene Selection Using Logistic Regressions Based on Aic, Bic and Mdl Criteria

In microarray-based cancer classification, gene selection is an important issue owing to the large number of variables (gene expressions) and the small number of experimental conditions. Many gene-selection and classification methods have been proposed; however most of these treat gene selection and classification separately, and not under the same model. We propose a Bayesian approach to gene selection using the logistic regression model. The Akaike information criterion (AIC), the Bayesian information criterion (BIC) and the minimum description length (MDL) principle are used in constructing the posterior distribution of the chosen genes. The same logistic regression model is then used for cancer classification. Fast implementation issues for these methods are discussed. The proposed methods are tested on several data sets including those arising from hereditary breast cancer, small round blue-cell tumors, lymphoma, and acute leukemia. The experimental results indicate that the proposed methods show high classification accuracies on these data sets. Some robustness and sensitivity properties of the proposed methods are also discussed. Finally, mixing logistic-regression based gene selection with other classification methods and mixing logistic-regression-based classification with other gene-selection methods are considered.