Mining co-regulated gene profiles for the detection of functional associations in gene expression data

MOTIVATION: Association pattern discovery (APD) methods have been successfully applied to gene expression data. They find groups of co-regulated genes in which the genes are either up- or down-regulated throughout the identified conditions. These methods, however, fail to identify similarly expressed genes whose expressions change between up- and down-regulation from one condition to another. In order to discover these hidden patterns, we propose the concept of mining co-regulated gene profiles. Co-regulated gene profiles contain two gene sets such that genes within the same set behave identically (up or down) while genes from different sets display contrary behavior. To reduce and group the large number of similar resulting patterns, we propose a new similarity measure that can be applied together with hierarchical clustering methods. RESULTS: We tested our proposed method on two well-known yeast microarray data sets. Our implementation mined the data effectively and discovered patterns of co-regulated genes that are hidden to traditional APD methods. The high content of biologically relevant information in these patterns is demonstrated by the significant enrichment of co-regulated genes with similar functions. Our experimental results show that the Mining Attribute Profile (MAP) method is an efficient tool for the analysis of gene expression data and competitive with bi-clustering techniques.