Gene selection and classification of microarray data method based on mutual information and moth flame algorithm

Several techniques or methods may help in detecting diseases and cancer. Creating an effective method for extracting disease information is one of the major challenges in the classification of gene expression data as long as there is (in the presence) a massive amount of redundant data and noise. Bio-inspired algorithms are among the most effective when used for solving gene selection. Moth Flame Optimization Algorithm (MFOA) is computationally less expensive and can converge faster than other methods. In this paper, we propose a new extension of the MFOA called the modified Moth Flame Algorithm (mMFA), the mMFA is combined with Mutual Information Maximization (MIM) to solve gene selection in microarray data classification. Our approach Called Mutual Information Maximization - modified Moth Flame Algorithm (MIMmMFA), the MIM based pre-filtering technique is used to measure the relevance and the redundancy of the genes, and the mMFA is used to evolve gene subsets and evaluated by the fitness function, which uses a Support Vector Machine (SVM) with Leave One Out Cross Validation (LOOCV) classifier and the number of selected genes. In order to test the performance of the proposed MIM-mMFA algorithm, we compared the MIM-mMFA algorithm with other recently published algorithms in the literature. The experiment results which have been conducted on sixteen benchmark datasets either binary-class or multi-class, confirm that MIM-mMFA algorithm provides a greater classification accuracy.