  In the field of functional genomics, the analysis of gene expression profiles
through Machine and Deep Learning is increasingly providing meaningful insight
into a number of diseases. The paper proposes a novel algorithm to perform
Feature Selection on genomic-scale data, which exploits the reconstruction
capabilities of autoencoders and an ad-hoc defined Explainable Artificial
Intelligence-based score in order to select the most informative genes for
diagnosis, prognosis, and precision medicine. Results of the application on a
Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia dataset evidence the effectiveness of the
algorithm, by identifying and suggesting a set of meaningful genes for further
medical investigation.
