A supervised data-driven approach for microarray spot quality classification

In this paper, the problem of classifying the quality of microarray data spots is addressed, using concepts derived from the supervised learning theory. The proposed method, after extracting spots from the microarray image, computes several features, which take into account shape, color and variability. The features are classified using support vector machines, a recent statistical classification technique that is being employed widely. The proposed method does not make any assumptions on the problem and does not require any a priori information. The proposed system has been tested in a real case, for several different parameters’ configurations. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed approach, also in comparison with state-of-the-art methods.