Forward selection radial basis function networks applied to bacterial classification based on MALDI-TOF-MS

Forward selection improved radial basis function (RBF) network was applied to bacterial classification based on the data obtained by matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization time-of-flight mass spectrometry (MALDI-TOF-MS). The classification of each bacterium cultured at different time was discussed and the effect of parameters of the RBF network was investigated. The new method involves forward selection to prevent overfitting and generalized cross-validation (GCV) was used as model selection criterion (MSC). The original data was compressed by using wavelet transformation to speed up the network training and reduce the number of variables of the original MS data. The data was normalized prior training and testing a network to define the area the neural network to be trained in, accelerate the training rate, and reduce the range the parameters to be selected in. The one-out-of-n method was used to split the data set of p samples into a training set of size p−1 and a test set of size 1. With the improved method, the classification correctness for the five bacteria discussed in the present paper are 87.5, 69.2, 80, 92.3, and 92.8%, respectively.