A Robust Procedure for Machine Learning Algorithms Using Gene Expression Data

Abstract

Cancer classification is one of the main objectives for analyzing big biological datasets. Machine learning algorithms (MLAs) have been extensively used to accomplish this task. Several popular MLAs are available in the literature to classify new samples into normal or cancer populations. Nevertheless, most of them often yield lower accuracies in the presence of outliers, which leads to incorrect classification of samples. Hence, in this study, we present a robust approach for the efficient and precise classification of samples using noisy GEDs. We examine the performance of the proposed procedure in a comparison of the five popular traditional MLAs (SVM, LDA, KNN, Naïve Bayes, Random forest) using both simulated and real gene expression data analysis. We also considered several rates of outliers (10%, 20%, and 50%). The results obtained from simulated data confirm that the traditional MLAs produce better results through our proposed procedure in the presence of outliers using the proposed modified datasets. The further transcriptome analysis found the significant involvement of these extra features in cancer diseases. The results indicated the performance improvement of the traditional MLAs with our proposed procedure. Hence, we propose to apply the proposed procedure instead of the traditional procedure for cancer classification.