Feature Selection and Cancer Classification Based on Microarray Data Using Multi-Objective Cuckoo Search Algorithm

Microarray datasets have an important role in identification and classification of the cancer tissues. In cancer researches, having a few samples of microarrays in cancer researches is one of the most concerns which lead to some problems in designing the classifiers. Moreover, due to the large number of features in microarrays, feature selection and classification are even more challenging for such datasets. Not all of these numerous features contribute to the classification task, and some even impede performance. Hence, appropriate gene selection method can significantly improve the performance of cancer classification. In this paper, a modified multi-objective cuckoo search algorithm is used to feature selection and sample selection to find the best available solutions. For accelerating the optimization process and preventing local optimum trapping, new heuristic approaches are included to the original algorithm. The proposed algorithm is applied on six cancer datasets and its results are compared with other existing methods. The results show that the proposed method has higher accuracy and validity in comparison to other existing approaches and is able to select the small subset of informative genes in order to increase the classification accuracy.