biomarkers in gene expression

backward selection or forward selection that can select top most discriminating biomarkers

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=5593146&tag=1
http://www.stat.ubc.ca/~rollin/teach/643w04/lec/node42.html

Forward selection has drawbacks, including the fact that each addition of a new variable may render one or more of the already included variables non-significant. An alternate approach which avoids this is backward selection. Under this approach, one starts with fitting a model with all the variables of interest (following the initial screen). Then the least significant variable is dropped, so long as it is not significant at our chosen critical level. We continue by successively re-fitting reduced models and applying the same rule until all remaining variables are statistically significant.