Discovering Influential Variables: A General Computer Intensive Method for Common Genetic Disorders

We describe a general backward partition method for discovering which of a large number of possible explanatory variables influence a dependent variable Y. This method, based on a variant pioneered by Lo and Zheng, and variations have been used successfully in several biological problems, some of which are discussed here. The problem is an example of feature or variable selection. Although the objective, to understand which are the influential variables, is often not the same as classification, the method has been successfully applied to that problem too.