A heuristic method for discovering biomarker candidates based on rough set theory.

We apply a combined method of heuristic attribute reduction and evaluation of relative reducts in rough set theory to gene expression data analysis. Our method extracts as many relative reducts as possible from the gene-expression data and selects the best relative reduct from the viewpoint of constructing useful decision rules. Using a breast cancer dataset and a leukemia dataset, we evaluated the classification accuracy for the test samples and biological meanings of the rules. As a result, our method presented superior classification accuracy comparable to existing salient classifiers. Moreover, our method extracted interesting rules including a novel biomarker gene identified in recent studies. These results indicate the possibility that our method can serve as a useful tool for gene expression data analysis.