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Feature selection is a common solution to microarray analysis. Previous approaches either select features based on classical statistical tests that can be tuned up with a classifier, or using regularization penalties incorporated in the cost function. Here we propose to use a feature ranking and weighting scheme instead, which combines statistical techniques with a weighted k -NN classifier using a modified forward selection procedure. We demonstrate that classification accuracy of our proposal outperforms existing methods on a range of public microarray gene expression datasets. The proposed method is also compared to state-of-the-art feature selection algorithms by means of the Friedman test. Although a bunch of feature selection techniques has been used for genomic data, the experimental results show the classification superiority of our method on most of the present gene expression datasets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Age-Related Macular Degeneration (AMD) is a dangerous, chronic, and progressive illness that mostly affects people over 60 years old. This disease is related to the appearance of drusen: deposits of extracellular material located in the macular region. One way to effectively and non-invasively pre-diagnose AMD is by detecting the presence of drusen in fundus images. In this work we propose a new method that combines Digital Image Processing, Mathematical Morphology and a robust and powerful Machine Learning model: a Support Vector Machine (SVM). The enclosed macular region is subjected to a contrast enhancement method, followed by the application of basic morphological operations. We use invariant moments as the features of the processed image. The resulting vector is classified by an SVM as positive or negative for drusen. The proposed method is able to discriminate between healthy and afflicted cases with a classification accuracy that outperforms many well-regarded state-of-the-art methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]