Cancer classification using Rotation Forest

We address the microarray dataset based cancer classification using a newly proposed multiple classifier system (MCS), referred to as Rotation Forest. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first time that Rotation Forest has been applied to the microarray dataset classification. In the framework of Rotation Forest, a linear transformation method is required to project data into new feature space for each classifier, and then the base classifiers are trained in different new spaces so as to enhance both the accuracies of base classifiers and the diversity in the ensemble system. Principal component analysis (PCA), non-parametric discriminant analysis (NDA) and random projections (RP) were applied to feature transformation in the original Rotation Forest. In this paper, we use independent component analysis (ICA) as a new transformation method since it can better describe the property of microarray data. The breast cancer dataset and prostate dataset are deployed to validate the efficiency of Rotation Forest. In all the experiments, it can be found that Rotation Forest outperforms other MCSs, such as Bagging and Boosting. In addition, the experimental results also revealed that ICA can further improve the performance of Rotation Forest compared with the original transformation methods.