Adaptive lasso with weights based on normalized filtering scores in molecular big data

The molecular big data are highly correlated, and numerous genes are not related. The various classification methods performance mainly rely on the selection of significant genes. Sparse regularized regression (SRR) models using the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (lasso) and adaptive lasso (alasso) are popularly used for gene selection and classification. Nevertheless, it becomes challenging when the genes are highly correlated. Here, we propose a modified adaptive lasso with weights using the ranking-based feature selection (RFS) methods capable of dealing with the highly correlated gene expression data. Firstly, an RFS methods such as Fisher’s score (FS), Chi-square (CS), and information gain (IG) are employed to ignore the unimportant genes and the top significant genes are chosen through sure independence screening (SIS) criteria. The scores of the ranked genes are normalized and assigned as proposed weights to the alasso method to obtain the most significant genes that were proven to be biologically related to the cancer type and helped in attaining higher classification performance. With the synthetic data and real application of microarray data, we demonstrated that the proposed alasso method with RFS methods is a better approach than the other known methods such as alasso with filtering such as ridge and marginal maximum likelihood estimation (MMLE), lasso and alasso without filtering. The metrics of accuracy, area under the receiver operating characteristics curve (AUROC), and geometric mean (GM-mean) are used for evaluating the performance of the models.