Two Stages Sparse Representation-based Classifier and its Application for Cancer Classification

Successful outcomes of Sparse Representation-based Classifier (SRC) and Sparse Subspace Clustering (SSC) in many applications motivated us to combine these methods and propose a hierarchical classifier. The main idea behind the SRC and SSC algorithms is to represent a data using a sparse linear combination of elementary signals so that those elementary signals which are similar to the data contribute mainly in the representation.In this paper, the performance of a sparse representation based classifier is improved by pre-clustering of training samples using the SSC algorithm. A two-stage SRC is then designed using the resulting clusters. A test data is classified by first determining the most similar cluster. The data label is subsequently found using the second stage classifier. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated considering cancer classification problem using the 14-Tumors microarray dataset. Due to low number of data samples per each class and high dimensionality of the data, this is a challenging problem.Curse of dimensionality,overfitting of theclassifier to the training data and computational complexity are the possible related problems. Our experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms some other state of the art classifiers.