This chapter presents a thorough background and deep literature review of the current topic of study. It also presents and defines the key concepts utilised throughout this investigation. It consists of ten sections: (1) a background on bioinformatics, (2) a discussion of colon cancer, (3) an overview of the microarray technology that is used to extract the dataset, (4) an overview of the colon cancer dataset, (5) a review of the most prevalent algorithms employed for gene selection and cancer classification, (6) a presentation of related works from the literature, (7) identification of feature selection approaches and procedures, (8) an investigation of the ML concept, (9) a review of algorithm efficiency and time complexity analysis, and (10) identification of current problems in the research area.