Feature selection of gene expression data for Cancer classification using double RBF-kernels

Background: Using knowledge-based interpretation to analyze omics data can not only obtain essential information regarding various biological processes, but also reflect the current physiological status of cells and tissue. The major challenge to analyze gene expression data, with a large number of genes and small samples, is to extract disease-related information from a massive amount of redundant data and noise. Gene selection, eliminating redundant and irrelevant genes, has been a key step to address this problem. Results: The modified method was tested on four benchmark datasets with either two-class phenotypes or multiclass phenotypes, outperforming previous methods, with relatively higher accuracy, true positive rate, false positive rate and reduced runtime. Conclusions: This paper proposes an effective feature selection method, combining double RBF-kernels with weighted analysis, to extract feature genes from gene expression data, by exploring its nonlinear mapping ability.