SMART: Unique splitting-while-merging framework for gene clustering

Copyright @ 2014 Fa et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.Successful clustering algorithms are highly dependent on parameter settings. The clustering performance degrades significantly unless parameters are properly set, and yet, it is difficult to set these parameters a priori. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose a unique splitting-while-merging clustering framework, named “splitting merging awareness tactics” (SMART), which does not require any a priori knowledge of either the number of clusters or even the possible range of this number. Unlike existing self-splitting algorithms, which over-cluster the dataset to a large number of clusters and then merge some similar clusters, our framework has the ability to split and merge clusters automatically during the process and produces the the most reliable clustering results, by intrinsically integrating many clustering techniques and tasks. The SMART framework is implemented with two distinct clustering paradigms in two algorithms: competitive learning and finite mixture model. Nevertheless, within the proposed SMART framework, many other algorithms can be derived for different clustering paradigms. The minimum message length algorithm is integrated into the framework as the clustering selection criterion. The usefulness of the SMART framework and its algorithms is tested in demonstration datasets and simulated gene expression datasets. Moreover, two real microarray gene expression datasets are studied using this approach. Based on the performance of many metrics, all numerical results show that SMART is superior to compared existing self-splitting algorithms and traditional algorithms. Three main properties of the proposed SMART framework are summarized as: (1) needing no parameters dependent on the respective dataset or a priori knowledge about the datasets, (2) extendible to many different applications, (3) offering superior performance compared with counterpart algorithms.National Institute for Health Researc

Multifrequency and Multistatic Inverse Synthetic Aperture Radar, with Application to FM Passive Radar

This paper deals with the imaging of a moving target using a multifrequency and multistatic radar consisting in one receiver and several narrowband transmitters. Considering two hypotheses about the studied target, we derive two multistatic inverse synthetic aperture radar processors: the first one, which models the target as a set of isotropic points, performs a coherent sum of bistatic images; the second one, which models the target as a set of nonisotropic points, performs an incoherent sum of bistatic images. Numerical simulations are done, which demonstrate the efficiency of the second processor. We also apply both processors to a multistatic passive radar scenario for which the transmitters are FM stations located in a realistic configuration. We study the system performance in terms of resolution and sidelobe levels as a function of the number of transmitters and of the integration time. Both processors are applied to similar complex targets for which the scattered fields are simulated by a numerical electromagnetic code. The resulting multistatic radar images show interesting characteristics that might be used by classification algorithms in future work