Classification of microarray cancer data using ensemble approach

An ensemble of classifiers is created by combining predictions of multiple component classifiers for improving prediction performance. In this paper, we conduct experimental comparison of J48, NB, IBK on nine microarray cancer datasets and also analyze their performance with Bagging, Boosting and Stack Generalization. The experimental results show that all ensemble methods outperform the individual classification methods. We then present a method, referred to as SD-EnClass, for combining classifiers from different classification families into an ensemble, based on a simple estimation of each classifier’s class performance. The experimental results show that the proposed model improves classification accuracy, in comparison to simply selecting the best classifier in the combination. In the second stage, we combine the results of our proposed method with the results of Boosting, Bagging and Stacking using the combining method proposed, to obtain results which are significantly better than using Boosting, Bagging or Stacking alone.