Multi-class Cancer Classification with OVR-Support Vector Machines Selected by Naïve Bayes Classifier

Support vector machines (SVMs), originally designed for binary classification, have been applied for multi-class classification, where an effective fusion scheme is required for combining outputs from them and producing a final result. In this work, we propose a novel method in which the SVMs are generated with the one-vs-rest (OVR) scheme and dynamically organized by the naïve Bayes classifiers (NBs). This method might break the ties that frequently occur when working with multi-class classification systems with OVR SVMs. More specifically, we use the Pearson correlation measure to select informative genes and reduce the dimensionality of gene expression profiles when constructing the NBs. The proposed method has been validated on GCM cancer dataset consisting of 14 types of tumors with 16,063 gene expression levels and produced higher accuracy than other methods.