Feature Selection via Embedded Learning Based on Tangent Space Alignment for Microarray Data

Feature selection has been widely established as an efficient technique for microarray data analysis. Feature selection aims to search for the most important feature/gene subset of a given dataset according to its relevance to the current target. Unsupervised feature selection is considered to be challenging due to the lack of label information. In this paper, we propose a novel method for unsupervised feature selection, which incorporates embedded learning and $l_{2,1}-norm$ sparse regression into a framework to select genes in microarray data analysis. Local tangent space alignment is applied during embedded learning to preserve the local data structure. The $l_{2,1}-norm$ sparse regression acts as a constraint to aid in learning the gene weights correlatively, by which the proposed method optimizes for selecting the informative genes which better capture the interesting natural classes of samples. We provide an effective algorithm to solve the optimization problem in our method. Finally, to validate the efficacy of the proposed method, we evaluate the proposed method on real microarray gene expression datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method obtains quite promising performance.