A Hybrid Barnacles Mating Optimizer Algorithm With Support Vector Machines for Gene Selection of Microarray Cancer Classification

Abstract

These days, the classification between normal and cancerous tissues and between different types of cancers represents a very important issue. Selecting the little informative number of genes is considered the main challenge in the cancer diagnosis issue. Therefore, Gene selection is usually the preliminary step for solving the cancer classification problems. Bio-inspired metaheuristic optimization algorithms, when used to solve gene selection and classification problems, they demonstrate their effectiveness. Barnacles Mating Optimizer (BMO) algorithm, which imitates the behavior of mating barnacles in nature for solving optimization problems, is considered one of these algorithms. In this paper, Barnacles Mating Optimizer (BMO) algorithm augmented with Support Vector Machines (SVM) called BMO-SVM is proposed for a microarray gene expression profiling in order to select the most predictive and informative genes for cancer classification. Conducting a comparative experimental study among a set of the most common bio-inspired optimization techniques to specify the most effective. A binary microarray dataset (i.e., leukemia1) and a multi-class microarray dataset (i.e., SRBCT, lymphoma, and leukemia2) are used for testing the performance of the proposed model. The experimental results revealed the superiority of the proposed BMO-SVM approach against several well-known meta-heuristic optimization algorithms, such as the Tunicate Swarm Algorithm (TSA), Genetic Algorithm (GA), Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), and Artificial Bee Colony (ABC). It is worth mentioning that our proposed algorithm achieves a high informational superiority percentage compared to other algorithms.

Keywords

• Gene selection
• microarray cancer classification
• feature selection
• barnacles mating optimizer algorithm
• support vector machines