Improved centroids estimation for the nearest shrunken centroid classifier

Sijian Wang, Ji Zhu

Abstract: The nearest shrunken centroid (NSC) method has been successfully applied in many DNA-microarray classification problems. The NSC uses ‘shrunken’ centroids as prototypes for each class and identifies subsets of genes that best characterize each class. Classification is then made to the nearest (shrunken) centroid. The NSC is very easy to implement and very easy to interpret, however, it has drawbacks.