Application of the Bayesian MMSE estimator for classification error to gene expression microarray data

With the development of high-throughput genomic and proteomic technologies, coupled with the inherent difficulties in obtaining large samples, biomedicine faces difficult small-sample classification issues, in particular, error estimation. Most popular error estimation methods are motivated by intuition rather than mathematical inference. A recently proposed error estimator based on Bayesian minimum mean square error estimation places error estimation in an optimal filtering framework. In this work, we examine the application of this error estimator to gene expression microarray data, including the suitability of the Gaussian model with normal-inverse-Wishart priors and how to find prior probabilities.