Feature selection algorithm recommendation for gene expression data through gradient boosting and neural network metamodels

Feature selection is an important step in gene expression data analysis. However, many feature selection methods exist and a costly experimentation is usually needed to determine the most suitable one for a given problem. This paper presents the application of gradient boosting and neural network techniques for the construction of metamodels that can recommend rankings of {feature selection - classification} algorithm pairs for new gene expression classification problems. Results in a corpus of 60 public data sets show the superiority of these techniques in producing more useful rankings in relation to classical metamodels.