In microarray data analysis, dimension reduction is an important consideration in the construction of a successful classification algorithm. As an alternative to feature selection, we use a well-known matrix factorisation method. For example, we can employ the popular singular-value decomposition (SVD) or nonnegative matrix factorization. In this paper, we consider a novel algorithm for gradient-based matrix factorisation (GMF). We compare GMF and SVD in their application to five gene expression datasets. The experimental results show that our method is faster, more stable, and sensitive.