Improving machine learning detection of Alzheimer disease using enhanced manta ray gene selection of Alzheimer gene expression datasets

One of the most prominent neurodegenerative diseases globally is Alzheimer's disease (AD). The early diagnosis of AD is a challenging task due to complex pathophysiology caused by the presence and accumulation of neurofibrillary tangles and amyloid plaques. However, the late enriched understanding of the genetic underpinnings of AD has been made possible due to recent advancements in data mining analysis methods, machine learning, and microarray technologies. However, the "curse of dimensionality" caused by the high-dimensional microarray datasets impacts the accurate prediction of the disease due to issues of overfitting, bias, and high computational demands. To alleviate such an effect, this study proposes a gene selection approach based on the parameter-free and large-scale manta ray foraging optimization algorithm. Given the dimensional disparities and statistical relationship distributions of the six investigated datasets, in addition to four evaluated machine learning classifiers; the proposed Sign Random Mutation and Best Rank enhancements that substantially improved MRFO's exploration and exploitation contributed to efficient identification of relevant genes and to machine learning improved prediction accuracy.