与实验条件相关的基因功能模块聚类分析方法

针对细胞内基因功能模块化的现象,定义了“基因功能模块”和“特征功能模块”两个概念,并基于这两个概念提出一种“与实验条件相关的基因功能模块聚类算法”。该算法综合利用基因功能知识与基因表达谱信息,将基因聚类为与实验条件相关的基因功能模块。向基因表达谱中加入水平逐渐升高的数据噪音,根据基因功能模块对数据噪音的抵抗力,确定最稳定的基因功能模块,即特征功能模块。加噪音实验显示,在基因芯片技术可能发生的噪音范围内,该算法对噪音的稳健性优于层次聚类和模糊C均值聚类。将模块聚类算法应用在NCI60数据集上,发现了8个与实验条件高度相关的特征功能模块。     

基于不同分类模型的基因芯片癌症诊断方法研究

基因芯片技术的发展为生物信息学带来了机遇,使在基因表达水平上进行癌症诊断成为可能。但基因芯片数据高维小样本的特征也使传统机器学习方法面临挑战。本文利用真实的基因表达数据,测试了目前主要的分类方法和降维方法在癌症诊断方面的效果,通过实验对比发现：基于线性核函数的支持向量机可以有效地分类肿瘤与非肿瘤的基因表达,从而为癌症诊断提供借鉴。     

MATLAB 7.X生物信息工具箱的应用——基因芯片分析(三)

本文主要介绍生物信息工具箱在基因芯片图像和数据处理方面的应用,通过基因芯片数据的基因表达图谱研究基因表达水平,比较健康组织和病变组织的区别,并且观察药物应用所造成的变化.以健康小鼠和帕金森疾病小鼠脑基因的表达情况和差别的分析为例,介绍生物信息工具箱用于标准化处理基因芯片数据,分析和可视化基因表达谱方面的应用.     

MATLAB7．X生物信息工具箱的应用-基因芯片分析（三）

本文主要介绍生物信息工具箱在基因芯片图像和数据处理方面的应用,通过基因芯片数据的基因表达图谱研究基因表达水平,比较健康组织和病变组织的区别,并且观察药物应用所造成的变化。以健康小鼠和帕金森疾病小鼠脑基因的表达情况和差别的分析为例,介绍生物信息工具箱用于标准化处理基因芯片数据,分析和可视化基因表达谱方面的应用。     

基于遗传算法的基因表达数据的K-均值聚类分析

聚类算法在基因表达数据的分析处理过程中得到日益广泛的应用。本文通过把K-均值聚类算法引入到遗传算法中,结合基因微阵列的特点,来讨论一种基于遗传算法的K-均值聚类模型,目的是利用遗传算法的全局性来提高聚类算法找到全局最优的可能性,实验结果证明,该算法可以很好地解决某些基因表达数据的聚类分析问题。     

芯片数据标准化方法比较研究

在基因芯片实验中,基因表达水平之间的相关性在推断基因间相互关系时起到非常重要的作用.未经标准化处理的芯片数据基因之间往往都呈现出很强的相关性,这些高相关性一部分是由基因表达水平变化引起的,而另外一部分是由系统偏差引起的.对芯片数据进行标准化处理的目的之一是消除系统偏差引起的高相关性,同时保留由真正生物学原因引起的基因表达水平高相关性.虽然目前对标准化方法已经有了不少比较研究,但还较少有人研究标准化方法对基因之间相关系数的影响,以及哪种方法最有利于恢复基因之间的相关性结构.通过对基因表达水平数据的模拟,具体比较了几种常用标准化方法的效果,从而给出最有利于恢复基因之间相关性结构的那种标准化方法.     

基于流形学习的基因表达谱数据可视化

基因表达谱的可视化本质上是高维数据的降维问题。采用流形学习算法来解决基因表达谱的降维数据可视化,讨论了典型的流形学习算法（Isomap和LLE）在表达谱降维中的适用性。通过类内／类间距离定量评价数据降维的效果,对两个典型基因芯片数据集（结肠癌基因表达谱数据集和急性白血病基因表达谱数据集）进行降维分析,发现两个数据集的本征维数都低于3,因而可以用流形学习方法在低维投影空间中进行可视化。与传统的降维方法（如PCA和MDS）的投影结果作比较,显示Isomap流形学习方法有更好的可视化效果。     

基于Fiedler向量的基因表达谱数据分类方法

尝试将一种基于图的Fiedler向量的聚类算法引入到基因表达谱数据的肿瘤分类中来。该方法将分属不同类的所有样本通过高斯权构造Laplace完全图,经SVD分解后获得Fiedler向量,利用各样本所对应的Fiedler向量分量的符号差异来进行基因表达谱数据的分类。通过模拟数据仿真实验和对白血病两个亚型(ALL与AML)及结肠癌真实数据实验,证明了这一方法的有效性。     

离子通道亚型与其基因共表达的关联研究

离子通道亚型与其基因共表达的关联对研究离子通道功能有重要意义。文章采用主成分分析和模糊C-均值聚类算法对数据进行分析, 将方法应用到人类和小鼠两套表达谱数据, 结果发现离子通道亚型中钾离子通道、钙离子通道、氯离子通道和受体激活型离子通道的表达谱聚类结果与生物学分类有较好的一致性, 体现了离子通道亚型在mRNA水平上的共表达, 并证实了通过离子通道表达谱能很好的对离子通道的功能亚型进行分类。     

改进的系统发育谱算法在蛋白质功能注释中的应用

系统发育谱方法是目前研究较多的一种基于非同源性的生物大分子功能注释方法。针对现有算法存在的一些缺陷,从两个方面对该方法做了改进：一是构造基于权重的系统发育谱;二是采用改进的聚类算法对发育谱的相似性进行分析。从NCBI上下载100条Escherichia coli K12蛋白质作为实验数据,分别使用改进的算法和经典的层次聚类算法、K均值聚类算法对相似谱进行分析。结果显示,提出的改进算法在对相似谱聚类的精确度上明显优于后两种聚类算法。     

Dynamic model-based clustering for time-course gene expression data

Microarray technology has produced a huge body of time-course gene expression data. Such gene expression data has proved useful in genomic disease diagnosis and genomic drug design. The challenge is how to uncover useful information in such data. Cluster analysis has played an important role in analyzing gene expression data. Many distance/correlation- and static model-based clustering techniques have been applied to time-course expression data. However, these techniques are unable to account for the dynamics of such data. It is the dynamics that characterize the data and that should be considered in cluster analysis so as to obtain high quality clustering. This paper proposes a dynamic model-based clustering method for time-course gene expression data. The proposed method regards a time-course gene expression dataset as a set of time series, generated by a number of stochastic processes. Each stochastic process defines a cluster and is described by an autoregressive model. A relocation-iteration algorithm is proposed to identity the model parameters and posterior probabilities are employed to assign each gene to an appropriate cluster. A bootstrapping method and an average adjusted Rand index (AARI) are employed to measure the quality of clustering. Computational experiments are performed on a synthetic and three real time-course gene expression datasets to investigate the proposed method. The results show that our method allows the better quality clustering than other clustering methods (e.g. k-means) for time-course gene expression data, and thus it is a useful and powerful tool for analyzing time-course gene expression data.     

A robust approach based on Weibull distribution for clustering gene expression data

Background

Clustering is a widely used technique for analysis of gene expression data. Most clustering methods group genes based on the distances, while few methods group genes according to the similarities of the distributions of the gene expression levels. Furthermore, as the biological annotation resources accumulated, an increasing number of genes have been annotated into functional categories. As a result, evaluating the performance of clustering methods in terms of the functional consistency of the resulting clusters is of great interest.

Results

In this paper, we proposed the WDCM (Weibull Distribution-based Clustering Method), a robust approach for clustering gene expression data, in which the gene expressions of individual genes are considered as the random variables following unique Weibull distributions. Our WDCM is based on the concept that the genes with similar expression profiles have similar distribution parameters, and thus the genes are clustered via the Weibull distribution parameters. We used the WDCM to cluster three cancer gene expression data sets from the lung cancer, B-cell follicular lymphoma and bladder carcinoma and obtained well-clustered results. We compared the performance of WDCM with k-means and Self Organizing Map (SOM) using functional annotation information given by the Gene Ontology (GO). The results showed that the functional annotation ratios of WDCM are higher than those of the other methods. We also utilized the external measure Adjusted Rand Index to validate the performance of the WDCM. The comparative results demonstrate that the WDCM provides the better clustering performance compared to k-means and SOM algorithms. The merit of the proposed WDCM is that it can be applied to cluster incomplete gene expression data without imputing the missing values. Moreover, the robustness of WDCM is also evaluated on the incomplete data sets.

Conclusions

The results demonstrate that our WDCM produces clusters with more consistent functional annotations than the other methods. The WDCM is also verified to be robust and is capable of clustering gene expression data containing a small quantity of missing values.     

Multi-class clustering of cancer subtypes through SVM based ensemble of pareto-optimal solutions for gene marker identification

With the advancement of microarray technology, it is now possible to study the expression profiles of thousands of genes across different experimental conditions or tissue samples simultaneously. Microarray cancer datasets, organized as samples versus genes fashion, are being used for classification of tissue samples into benign and malignant or their subtypes. They are also useful for identifying potential gene markers for each cancer subtype, which helps in successful diagnosis of particular cancer types. In this article, we have presented an unsupervised cancer classification technique based on multiobjective genetic clustering of the tissue samples. In this regard, a real-coded encoding of the cluster centers is used and cluster compactness and separation are simultaneously optimized. The resultant set of near-Pareto-optimal solutions contains a number of non-dominated solutions. A novel approach to combine the clustering information possessed by the non-dominated solutions through Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier has been proposed. Final clustering is obtained by consensus among the clusterings yielded by different kernel functions. The performance of the proposed multiobjective clustering method has been compared with that of several other microarray clustering algorithms for three publicly available benchmark cancer datasets. Moreover, statistical significance tests have been conducted to establish the statistical superiority of the proposed clustering method. Furthermore, relevant gene markers have been identified using the clustering result produced by the proposed clustering method and demonstrated visually. Biological relationships among the gene markers are also studied based on gene ontology. The results obtained are found to be promising and can possibly have important impact in the area of unsupervised cancer classification as well as gene marker identification for multiple cancer subtypes.     

Evaluation and comparison of gene clustering methods in microarray analysis

MOTIVATION: Microarray technology has been widely applied in biological and clinical studies for simultaneous monitoring of gene expression in thousands of genes. Gene clustering analysis is found useful for discovering groups of correlated genes potentially co-regulated or associated to the disease or conditions under investigation. Many clustering methods including hierarchical clustering, K-means, PAM, SOM, mixture model-based clustering and tight clustering have been widely used in the literature. Yet no comprehensive comparative study has been performed to evaluate the effectiveness of these methods. RESULTS: In this paper, six gene clustering methods are evaluated by simulated data from a hierarchical log-normal model with various degrees of perturbation as well as four real datasets. A weighted Rand index is proposed for measuring similarity of two clustering results with possible scattered genes (i.e. a set of noise genes not being clustered). Performance of the methods in the real data is assessed by a predictive accuracy analysis through verified gene annotations. Our results show that tight clustering and model-based clustering consistently outperform other clustering methods both in simulated and real data while hierarchical clustering and SOM perform among the worst. Our analysis provides deep insight to the complicated gene clustering problem of expression profile and serves as a practical guideline for routine microarray cluster analysis.     

Assessing reliability of gene clusters from gene expression data

The rapid development of microarray technologies has raised many challenging problems in experiment design and data analysis. Although many numerical algorithms have been successfully applied to analyze gene expression data, the effects of variations and uncertainties in measured gene expression levels across samples and experiments have been largely ignored in the literature. In this article, in the context of hierarchical clustering algorithms, we introduce a statistical resampling method to assess the reliability of gene clusters identified from any hierarchical clustering method. Using the clustering trees constructed from the resampled data, we can evaluate the confidence value for each node in the observed clustering tree. A majority-rule consensus tree can be obtained, showing clusters that only occur in a majority of the resampled trees. We illustrate our proposed methods with applications to two published data sets. Although the methods are discussed in the context of hierarchical clustering methods, they can be applied with other cluster-identification methods for gene expression data to assess the reliability of any gene cluster of interest. Electronic Publication     

Bagging to improve the accuracy of a clustering procedure

MOTIVATION: The microarray technology is increasingly being applied in biological and medical research to address a wide range of problems such as the classification of tumors. An important statistical question associated with tumor classification is the identification of new tumor classes using gene expression profiles. Essential aspects of this clustering problem include identifying accurate partitions of the tumor samples into clusters and assessing the confidence of cluster assignments for individual samples. RESULTS: Two new resampling methods, inspired from bagging in prediction, are proposed to improve and assess the accuracy of a given clustering procedure. In these ensemble methods, a partitioning clustering procedure is applied to bootstrap learning sets and the resulting multiple partitions are combined by voting or the creation of a new dissimilarity matrix. As in prediction, the motivation behind bagging is to reduce variability in the partitioning results via averaging. The performances of the new and existing methods were compared using simulated data and gene expression data from two recently published cancer microarray studies. The bagged clustering procedures were in general at least as accurate and often substantially more accurate than a single application of the partitioning clustering procedure. A valuable by-product of bagged clustering are the cluster votes which can be used to assess the confidence of cluster assignments for individual observations. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: For supplementary information on datasets, analyses, and software, consult http://www.stat.berkeley.edu/~sandrine and http://www.bioconductor.org.     

A multi-stage approach to clustering and imputation of gene expression profiles

MOTIVATION: Microarray experiments have revolutionized the study of gene expression with their ability to generate large amounts of data. This article describes an alternative to existing approaches to clustering of gene expression profiles; the key idea is to cluster in stages using a hierarchy of distance measures. This method is motivated by the way in which the human mind sorts and so groups many items. The distance measures arise from the orthogonal breakup of Euclidean distance, giving us a set of independent measures of different attributes of the gene expression profile. Interpretation of these distances is closely related to the statistical design of the microarray experiment. This clustering method not only accommodates missing data but also leads to an associated imputation method. RESULTS: The performance of the clustering and imputation methods was tested on a simulated dataset, a yeast cell cycle dataset and a central nervous system development dataset. Based on the Rand and adjusted Rand indices, the clustering method is more consistent with the biological classification of the data than commonly used clustering methods. The imputation method, at varying levels of missingness, outperforms most imputation methods, based on root mean squared error (RMSE). AVAILABILITY: Code in R is available on request from the authors.     

Molecular pattern discovery based on penalized matrix decomposition

A reliable and precise identification of the type of tumors is crucial to the effective treatment of cancer. With the rapid development of microarray technologies, tumor clustering based on gene expression data is becoming a powerful approach to cancer class discovery. In this paper, we apply the penalized matrix decomposition (PMD) to gene expression data to extract metasamples for clustering. The extracted metasamples capture the inherent structures of samples belong to the same class. At the same time, the PMD factors of a sample over the metasamples can be used as its class indicator in return. Compared with the conventional methods such as hierarchical clustering (HC), self-organizing maps (SOM), affinity propagation (AP) and nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF), the proposed method can identify the samples with complex classes. Moreover, the factor of PMD can be used as an index to determine the cluster number. The proposed method provides a reasonable explanation of the inconsistent classifications made by the conventional methods. In addition, it is able to discover the modules in gene expression data of conterminous developmental stages. Experiments on two representative problems show that the proposed PMD-based method is very promising to discover biological phenotypes.     

A hybrid genetic algorithm and expectation maximization method for global gene trajectory clustering

Clustering time-course gene expression data (gene trajectories) is an important step towards solving the complex problem of gene regulatory network modeling and discovery as it significantly reduces the dimensionality of the gene space required for analysis. Traditional clustering methods that perform hill-climbing from randomly initialized cluster centers are prone to produce inconsistent and sub-optimal cluster solutions over different runs. This paper introduces a novel method that hybridizes genetic algorithm (GA) and expectation maximization algorithms (EM) for clustering gene trajectories with the mixtures of multiple linear regression models (MLRs), with the objective of improving the global optimality and consistency of the clustering performance. The proposed method is applied to cluster the human fibroblasts and the yeast time-course gene expression data based on their trajectory similarities. It outperforms the standard EM method significantly in terms of both clustering accuracy and consistency. The biological implications of the improved clustering performance are demonstrated.     

Cluster-based network model for time-course gene expression data

We propose a model-based approach to unify clustering and network modeling using time-course gene expression data. Specifically, our approach uses a mixture model to cluster genes. Genes within the same cluster share a similar expression profile. The network is built over cluster-specific expression profiles using state-space models. We discuss the application of our model to simulated data as well as to time-course gene expression data arising from animal models on prostate cancer progression. The latter application shows that with a combined statistical/bioinformatics analyses, we are able to extract gene-to-gene relationships supported by the literature as well as new plausible relationships.