Bias reduction in representation of histopathology images using deep feature selection.

Appearing traces of bias in deep networks is a serious reliability issue which can play a significant role in ethics and generalization related concerns. Recent studies report that the deep features extracted from the histopathology images of The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA), the largest publicly available archive, are surprisingly able to accurately classify the whole slide images (WSIs) based on their acquisition site while these features are extracted to primarily discriminate cancer types. This is clear evidence that the utilized Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) unexpectedly detect the specific patterns of the source site, i.e, the hospital of origin, rather than histomorphologic patterns, a biased behavior resulting in degraded trust and generalization. This observation motivated us to propose a method to alleviate the destructive impact of hospital bias through a novel feature selection process. To this effect, we have proposed an evolutionary strategy to select a small set of optimal features to not only accurately represent the histological patterns of tissue samples but also to eliminate the features contributing to internal bias toward the institution. The defined objective function for an optimal subset selection of features is to minimize the accuracy of the model to classify the source institutions which is basically defined as a bias indicator. By the conducted experiments, the selected features extracted by the state-of-the-art network trained on TCGA images (i.e., the KimiaNet), considerably decreased the institutional bias, while improving the quality of features to discriminate the cancer types. In addition, the selected features could significantly improve the results of external validation compared to the entire set of features which has been negatively affected by bias. The proposed scheme is a model-independent approach which can be employed when it is possible to define a bias indicator as a participating objective in a feature selection process; even with unknown bias sources.

An evolutionary decomposition-based multi-objective feature selection for multi-label classification.

Data classification is a fundamental task in data mining. Within this field, the classification of multi-labeled data has been seriously considered in recent years. In such problems, each data entity can simultaneously belong to several categories. Multi-label classification is important because of many recent real-world applications in which each entity has more than one label. To improve the performance of multi-label classification, feature selection plays an important role. It involves identifying and removing irrelevant and redundant features that unnecessarily increase the dimensions of the search space for the classification problems. However, classification may fail with an extreme decrease in the number of relevant features. Thus, minimizing the number of features and maximizing the classification accuracy are two desirable but conflicting objectives in multi-label feature selection. In this article, we introduce a multi-objective optimization algorithm customized for selecting the features of multi-label data. The proposed algorithm is an enhanced variant of a decomposition-based multi-objective optimization approach, in which the multi-label feature selection problem is divided into single-objective subproblems that can be simultaneously solved using an evolutionary algorithm. This approach leads to accelerating the optimization process and finding more diverse feature subsets. The proposed method benefits from a local search operator to find better solutions for each subproblem. We also define a pool of genetic operators to generate new feature subsets based on old generation. To evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm, we compare it with two other multi-objective feature selection approaches on eight real-world benchmark datasets that are commonly used for multi-label classification. The reported results of multi-objective method evaluation measures, such as hypervolume indicator and set coverage, illustrate an improvement in the results obtained by the proposed method. Moreover, the proposed method achieved better results in terms of classification accuracy with fewer features compared with state-of-the-art methods.