Exploring correlations in gene expression microarray data for maximum predictive-minimum redundancy biomarker selection and classification

An important issue in the analysis of gene expression microarray data is concerned with the extraction of valuable genetic interactions from high dimensional data sets containing gene expression levels collected for a small sample of assays. Past and ongoing research efforts have been focused on biomarker selection for phenotype classification. Usually, many genes convey useless information for classifying the outcome and should be removed from the analysis; on the other hand, some of them may be highly correlated, which reveals the presence of redundant expressed information. In this paper we propose a method for the selection of highly predictive genes having a low redundancy in their expression levels. The predictive accuracy of the selection is assessed by means of Classification and Regression Trees (CART) models which enable assessment of the performance of the selected genes for classifying the outcome variable and will also uncover complex genetic interactions. The method is illustrated throughout the paper using a public domain colon cancer gene expression data set.