BackgroundVarious statistical and machine learning methods have been successfully applied to the classification of DNA microarray data. Simple instance-based classifiers such as nearest neighbor (NN) approaches perform remarkably well in comparison to more complex models, and are currently experiencing a renaissance in the analysis of data sets from biology and biotechnology. While binary classification of microarray data has been extensively investigated, studies involving multiclass data are rare. The question remains open whether there exists a significant difference in performance between NN approaches and more complex multiclass methods. Comparative studies in this field commonly assess different models based on their classification accuracy only; however, this approach lacks the rigor needed to draw reliable conclusions and is inadequate for testing the null hypothesis of equal performance. Comparing novel classification models to existing approaches requires focusing on the significance of differences in performance.
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