An Approach for Cancer-Type Classification Using Feature Selection Techniques with Convolutional Neural Network

Cancer diagnosis and treatment depend on accurate cancer-type prediction. A prediction model can infer significant cancer features (genes). Gene expression is among the most frequently used features in cancer detection. Deep Learning (DL) architectures, which demonstrate cutting-edge performance in many disciplines, are not appropriate for the gene expression data since it contains a few samples with thousands of features. This study presents an approach that applies three feature selection techniques (Lasso, Random Forest, and Chi-Square) on gene expression data obtained from Pan-Cancer Atlas through the TCGA Firehose Data using R statistical software version 4.2.2. We calculated the feature importance of each selection method. Then we calculated the mean of the feature importance to determine the threshold for selecting the most relevant features. We constructed five models with a simple convolutional neural networks (CNNs) architecture, which are trained using the selected features and then selected the winning model. The winning model achieved a precision of 94.11%, a recall of 94.26%, an F1-score of 94.14%, and an accuracy of 96.16% on a test set.