Feature selection and time regression software: Application on predicting Alzheimer´s disease progress

In this paper, the Bayes classifier is used to predict Alzheimer´s disease progress. The classifier is trained on a subset of the Alzheimer´s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative database. Subjects are diagnosed by doctors as belonging to healthy, mild-cognitive impaired, and Alzheimer´s disease class. A software tool for features selection and time regression is developed. The tool utilizes a variant of the Sequential Forward Selection (SFS) algorithm for feature selection, where the criterion used for selecting features is the correct classification rate of the Bayes classifier. The tool also employs linear regression to predict future values of selected biomarkers, such as the hippocampus volume, from past measurements, so that future class of the subject can be predicted.