This paper empirically compares six background correction methods aimed at removing unspecific background noise of the overall signal level measured by a scanner across microarrays. Using three published cDNA microarray datasets we investigated the effect of background correction on cancer classification in terms of the predictive performance of two classifiers (k-NN and support vector machine with linear kernel) induced from microarray data where a particular background correction method is applied, individually and in combination with a single-bias or double-bias-removal normalization method.