Survival analysis of gene expression data using PSO based radial basis function networks

Gene expression data combined with clinical data has emerged as an important source for survival analysis. However, gene expression data is characterized with thousands of features/genes but only tens or hundreds of observations. The high-dimensionality and unbalance between features and samples pose big challenges for the classical survival analysis methods. This paper proposes a particle swarm optimization based radial basis function networks (PSO-RBFN) for the survival analysis on gene expression data. Particularly, PSO-RBFN applies a principle component analysis for dimensionality reduction and optimizes the RBF network using PSO. The experimental results on three gene expression datasets indicate that PSO-RBFN is able to improve the predict accuracy compared to the other classical survival analysis methods.