Background: Biclustering algorithms search for groups of genes that share the same
behavior under a subset of samples in gene expression data. Nowadays, the biological
knowledge available in public repositories can be used to drive these algorithms to
find biclusters composed of groups of genes functionally coherent. On the other hand,
a distance among genes can be defined according to their information stored in Gene
Ontology (GO). Gene pairwise GO semantic similarity measures report a value for each
pair of genes which establishes their functional similarity. A scatter search-based
algorithm that optimizes a merit function that integrates GO information is studied in
this paper. This merit function uses a term that addresses the information through a GO
measure.
Results: The effect of two possible different gene pairwise GO measures on the
performance of the algorithm is analyzed. Firstly, three well known yeast datasets with
approximately one thousand of genes are studied. Secondly, a group of human
datasets related to clinical data of cancer is also explored by the algorithm. Most of
these data are high-dimensional datasets composed of a huge number of genes. The
resultant biclusters reveal groups of genes linked by a same functionality when the
search procedure is driven by one of the proposed GO measures. Furthermore, a
qualitative biological study of a group of biclusters show their relevance from a cancer
disease perspective.
Conclusions: It can be concluded that the integration of biological information
improves the performance of the biclustering process. The two different GO measures
studied show an improvement in the results obtained for the yeast dataset. However, if
datasets are composed of a huge number of genes, only one of them really improves
the algorithm performance. This second case constitutes a clear option to explore
interesting datasets from a clinical point of view.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad TIN2014-55894-C2-
