Survival analysis of gene expression data using PSO based radial basis function networks

Wenmin Liu, Zhen Ji, Shan He, Zexuan Zhu

Abstract: Gene expression data combined with clinical data has emerged as an important source for survival analysis. However, gene expression data is characterized with thousands of features/genes but only tens or hundreds of observations. The high-dimensionality and unbalance between features and samples pose big challenges for the classical survival analysis methods. This paper proposes a particle swarm optimization based radial basis function networks (PSO-RBFN) for the survival analysis on gene expression data. Particularly, PSO-RBFN applies a principle component analysis for dimensionality reduction and optimizes the RBF network using PSO. The experimental results on three gene expression datasets indicate that PSO-RBFN is able to improve the predict accuracy compared to the other classical survival analysis methods.