Binary Political Optimizer for Feature Selection Using Gene Expression Data

DNA Microarray technology is an emergent field, which offers the possibility of obtaining simultaneous estimates of the expression levels of several thousand genes in an organism in a single experiment. One of the most significant challenges in this research field is to select high relevant genes from gene expression data. To address this problem, feature selection is a well-known technique to eliminate unnecessary genes in order to ensure accurate classification results. This paper proposes a binary version of Political Optimizer (PO) to solve feature selection problem using gene expression data. Two transfer functions are used to design a binary PO. The first one is based on Sigmoid function and will be noted as BPO-S, while the second one is based on V-shaped function and will be noted as BPO-V. The proposed methods are evaluated using 9 biological datasets and compared with 8 binary well-known metaheuristics. The comparative results show the prevalent performance of the BPO methods especially BPO-V in comparison with other techniques.