Gene selection is the process of selecting the optimal feature subset in an arbitrary dataset. The significance of gene selection is in high dimensional datasets in which the number of samples and features are low and high respectively. The major goals of gene selection are increasing the accuracy, finding the minimal effective feature subset, and increasing the performance of evaluations. This paper proposed two heuristic methods for gene selection, namely, Xvariance against Mutual Congestion. Xvariance tries to classify labels using internal attributes of features however Mutual Congestion is frequency based. The proposed methods have been conducted on eight binary medical datasets. Results reveal that Xvariance works well with standard datasets, however Mutual Congestion improves the accuracy of high dimensional datasets considerably. •Proposing two heuristic methods for gene selection.•Xvariance tries to classify labels using internal attributes of features.•Mutual Congestion is frequency based feature selection method.