ILRC: a hybrid biomarker discovery algorithm based on improved L1 regularization and clustering in microarray data

BACKGROUND: Finding significant genes or proteins from gene chip data for disease diagnosis and drug development is an important task. However, the challenge comes from the curse of the data dimension. It is of great significance to use machine learning methods to find important features from the data and build an accurate classification model. RESULTS: The proposed method has proved superior to the published advanced hybrid feature selection method and traditional feature selection method on different public microarray data sets. In addition, the biomarkers selected using our method show a match to those provided by the cooperative hospital in a set of clinical cleft lip and palate data. METHOD: In this paper, a feature selection algorithm ILRC based on clustering and improved L1 regularization is proposed. The features are firstly clustered, and the redundant features in the sub-clusters are deleted. Then all the remaining features are iteratively evaluated using ILR. The final result is given according to the cumulative weight reordering. CONCLUSION: The proposed method can effectively remove redundant features. The algorithm’s output has high stability and classification accuracy, which can potentially select potential biomarkers.