Gene ontology friendly biclustering of expression profiles

The soundness of clustering in the analysis of gene expression profiles and gene function prediction is based on the hypothesis that genes with similar expression profiles may imply strong correlations with their functions in the biological activities. Gene ontology (GO) has become a well accepted standard in organizing gene function categories. Different gene function categories in GO can have very sophisticated relationships, such as 'part of' and 'overlapping'. Until now, no clustering algorithm can generate gene clusters within which the relationships can naturally reflect those of gene function categories in the GO hierarchy. The failure in resembling the relationships may reduce the confidence of clustering in gene function prediction. In this paper, we present a new clustering technique, smart hierarchical tendency preserving clustering (SMTP-clustering), based on a bicluster model, tendency preserving cluster (TP-Cluster). By directly incorporating gene ontology information into the clustering process, the SMTP-clustering algorithm yields a TP-cluster tree within which any subtree can be well mapped to a part of the GO hierarchy. Our experiments on yeast cell cycle data demonstrate that this method is efficient and effective in generating the biological relevant TP-clusters.