Are filter methods very effective in gene selection of microarray data?

Feature (gene) selection is a frequently used preprocessing technology for successful cancer classification task in microarray gene expression data analysis. Widely used gene selection approaches are mainly focused on the filter methods. Filter methods are usually considered to be very effective and efficient for high-dimensional data. This paper reviews the existing filter methods, and shows the performance of the representative algorithms on microarray data by extensive experimental study. Surprisingly, the experimental results show that filter methods are not very effective on microarray data. We analyze the cause of the result and provide the basic ideas for potential solutions.