An Efficient Binary Sand Cat Swarm Optimization for Feature Selection in High-Dimensional Biomedical Data

Recent breakthroughs are making a significant contribution to big data in biomedicine which are anticipated to assist in disease diagnosis and patient care management. To obtain relevant information from this data, effective administration and analysis are required. One of the major challenges associated with biomedical data analysis is the so-called “curse of dimensionality”. For this issue, a new version of Binary Sand Cat Swarm Optimization (called PILC-BSCSO), incorporating a pinhole-imaging-based learning strategy and crossover operator, is presented for selecting the most informative features. First, the crossover operator is used to strengthen the search capability of BSCSO. Second, the pinhole-imaging learning strategy is utilized to effectively increase exploration capacity while avoiding premature convergence. The Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier with a linear kernel is used to assess classification accuracy. The experimental results show that the PILC-BSCSO algorithm beats 11 cutting-edge techniques in terms of classification accuracy and the number of selected features using three public medical datasets. Moreover, PILC-BSCSO achieves a classification accuracy of 100% for colon cancer, which is difficult to classify accurately, based on just 10 genes. A real Liver Hepatocellular Carcinoma (TCGA-HCC) data set was also used to further evaluate the effectiveness of the PILC-BSCSO approach. PILC-BSCSO identifies a subset of five marker genes, including prognostic biomarkers HMMR, CHST4, and COL15A1, that have excellent predictive potential for liver cancer using TCGA data.