Clustering of gene expression data: performance and similarity analysis

BACKGROUND: DNA Microarray technology is an innovative methodology in experimental molecular biology, which has produced huge amounts of valuable data in the profile of gene expression. Many clustering algorithms have been proposed to analyze gene expression data, but little guidance is available to help choose among them. The evaluation of feasible and applicable clustering algorithms is becoming an important issue in today's bioinformatics research. RESULTS: In this paper we first experimentally study three major clustering algorithms: Hierarchical Clustering (HC), Self-Organizing Map (SOM), and Self Organizing Tree Algorithm (SOTA) using Yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae gene expression data, and compare their performance. We then introduce Cluster Diff, a new data mining tool, to conduct the similarity analysis of clusters generated by different algorithms. The performance study shows that SOTA is more efficient than SOM while HC is the least efficient. The results of similarity analysis show that when given a target cluster, the Cluster Diff can efficiently determine the closest match from a set of clusters. Therefore, it is an effective approach for evaluating different clustering algorithms. CONCLUSION: HC methods allow a visual, convenient representation of genes. However, they are neither robust nor efficient. The SOM is more robust against noise. A disadvantage of SOM is that the number of clusters has to be fixed beforehand. The SOTA combines the advantages of both hierarchical and SOM clustering. It allows a visual representation of the clusters and their structure and is not sensitive to noises. The SOTA is also more flexible than the other two clustering methods. By using our data mining tool, Cluster Diff, it is possible to analyze the similarity of clusters generated by different algorithms and thereby enable comparisons of different clustering methods

Self-adaptive GA, quantitative semantic similarity measures and ontology-based text clustering

As the common clustering algorithms use vector space model (VSM) to represent document, the conceptual relationships between related terms which do not co-occur literally are ignored. A genetic algorithm-based clustering technique, named GA clustering, in conjunction with ontology is proposed in this article to overcome this problem. In general, the ontology measures can be partitioned into two categories: thesaurus-based methods and corpus-based methods. We take advantage of the hierarchical structure and the broad coverage taxonomy of Wordnet as the thesaurus-based ontology. However, the corpus-based method is rather complicated to handle in practical application. We propose a transformed latent semantic analysis (LSA) model as the corpus-based method in this paper. Moreover, two hybrid strategies, the combinations of the various similarity measures, are implemented in the clustering experiments. The results show that our GA clustering algorithm, in conjunction with the thesaurus-based and the LSA-based method, apparently outperforms that with other similarity measures. Moreover, the superiority of the GA clustering algorithm proposed over the commonly used k-means algorithm and the standard GA is demonstrated by the improvements of the clustering performance

Linear, Deterministic, and Order-Invariant Initialization Methods for the K-Means Clustering Algorithm

Over the past five decades, k-means has become the clustering algorithm of choice in many application domains primarily due to its simplicity, time/space efficiency, and invariance to the ordering of the data points. Unfortunately, the algorithm's sensitivity to the initial selection of the cluster centers remains to be its most serious drawback. Numerous initialization methods have been proposed to address this drawback. Many of these methods, however, have time complexity superlinear in the number of data points, which makes them impractical for large data sets. On the other hand, linear methods are often random and/or sensitive to the ordering of the data points. These methods are generally unreliable in that the quality of their results is unpredictable. Therefore, it is common practice to perform multiple runs of such methods and take the output of the run that produces the best results. Such a practice, however, greatly increases the computational requirements of the otherwise highly efficient k-means algorithm. In this chapter, we investigate the empirical performance of six linear, deterministic (non-random), and order-invariant k-means initialization methods on a large and diverse collection of data sets from the UCI Machine Learning Repository. The results demonstrate that two relatively unknown hierarchical initialization methods due to Su and Dy outperform the remaining four methods with respect to two objective effectiveness criteria. In addition, a recent method due to Erisoglu et al. performs surprisingly poorly.Comment: 21 pages, 2 figures, 5 tables, Partitional Clustering Algorithms (Springer, 2014). arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1304.7465, arXiv:1209.196