Genetic Algorithm for Variable Selection and Parameter Optimization in SVM and Fuzzy SVM for Colon Cancer Microarray Classification

Colon cancer is the second leading cause of cancer-related deaths in the world, hence research on that topic needs to be undertaken with improvement. Recent advanced in microarray technology allows the monitoring of the expression level of a large set of genes simultaneously. Microarray data is a type of high-dimensional data with hundreds or even thousands number of genes (features), while usually the number of patients observed (observations) is much smaller than the number of features. This study uses a colon cancer microarray dataset contains two class of genes, normal and tumor. The aims of this study is to develop a classification model using fuzzy support vector machines (FSVM) hybridized with genetic algorithm (GA) for classifying individuals based on gene expression. Fuzzy memberships was used in SVM in order to deal with the case of imbalanced microarray data. Meanwhile, the role of genetic algorithm is, firstly, to select the relevant genes as the features and, secondly, to optimize the parameter of FSVM as GA is able to handle the problem of nonlinear optimization that has a high dimension, adaptable, and easily combined with other methods. The classification using FCBF selection has a higher accuracy value than the ones without the selection. The results also show that FSVM that has been optimized using GA has the highest accuracy value compared to other classification methods used in this study.