A Hybrid Feature-Selection Method Based on mRMR and Binary Differential Evolution for Gene Selection

Abstract

The selection of critical features from microarray data as biomarkers holds significant importance in disease diagnosis and drug development. It is essential to reduce the number of biomarkers while maintaining their performance to effectively minimize subsequent validation costs. However, the processing of microarray data often encounters the challenge of the “curse of dimensionality”. Existing feature-selection methods face difficulties in effectively reducing feature dimensionality while ensuring classification accuracy, algorithm efficiency, and optimal search space exploration. This paper proposes a hybrid feature-selection algorithm based on an enhanced version of the Max Relevance and Min Redundancy (mRMR) method, coupled with differential evolution. The proposed method improves the quantization functions of mRMR to accommodate the continuous nature of microarray data attributes, utilizing them as the initial step in feature selection. Subsequently, an enhanced differential evolution algorithm is employed to further filter the features. Two adaptive mechanisms are introduced to enhance early search efficiency and late population diversity, thus reducing the number of features and balancing the algorithm’s exploration and exploitation. The results highlight the improved performance and efficiency of the hybrid algorithm in feature selection for microarray data analysis.