Memetic Algorithms for Feature Selection on Microarray Data

In this paper, we present two novel memetic algorithms (MAs) for gene selection. Both are synergies of Genetic Algorithm (wrapper methods) and local search methods (filter methods) under a memetic framework. In particular, the first MA is a Wrapper-Filter Feature Selection Algorithm (WFFSA) fine-tunes the population of genetic algorithm (GA) solutions by adding or deleting features based on univariate feature filter ranking method. The second MA approach, Markov BlanketEmbedded Genetic Algorithm (MBEGA), fine-tunes the population of solutions by adding relevant features, removing redundant and/or irrelevant features using Markov blanket. Our empirical studies on synthetic and real world microarray dataset suggest that both memetic approaches select more suitable gene subset than the basic GA and at the same time outperforms GA in terms of classification predictions. While the classification accuracies between WFFSA and MBEGA are not significantly statistically different on most of the datasets considered, MBEGA is observed to converge to more compact gene subsets than WFFSA.