Feature selection approaches based on mutual information can be roughly categorized into two groups. The first group minimizes the redundancy of features between each other. The second group maximizes the new classification information of features providing for the selected subset. A critical issue is that large new information does not signify little redundancy, and vice versa. Features with large new information but with high redundancy may be selected by the second group, and features with low redundancy but with little relevance with classes may be highly scored by the first group. Existing approaches fail to balance the importance of both terms. As such, a new information term denoted as Independent Classification Information is proposed in this paper. It assembles the newly provided information and the preserved information negatively correlated with the redundant information. Redundancy and new information are properly unified and equally treated in the new term. This strategy helps find the predictive features providing large new information and little redundancy. Moreover, independent classification information is proved as a loose upper bound of the total classification information of feature subset. Its maximization is conducive to achieve a high global discriminative performance. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the new approach.

Cancer classification is the critical basis for patient-tailored therapy. Conventional histological analysis tends to be unreliable because different tumors may have similar appearance. The advances in microarray technology make individualized therapy possible. Various machine learning methods can be employed to classify cancer tissue samples based on microarray data. However, few methods can be elegantly adopted for generating accurate and reliable as well as biologically interpretable rules. In this paper, we introduce an approach for classifying cancers based on the principle of minimal rough fringe. For training rough hypercuboid classifiers from gene expression data sets, the method dynamically evaluates all available genes and sifts the genes with the smallest implicit regions as the dimensions of implicit hypercuboids. An unseen object is predicted to be a certain class if it falls within the corresponding class hypercuboid. Based upon the method, ensemble rough hypercuboid classifiers are subsequently constructed. Experimental results on some open cancer gene expression data sets show that the proposed method is capable of generating accurate and interpretable rules compared with some other machine learning methods. Hence, it is a feasible way of classifying cancer tissues in biomedical applications.