Applying formal concept analysis for visualizing DNA methylation status in breast cancer tumor subtypes

DNA methylation have been associated with cancer in several investigations. Methylation of CpG sites associated with genes can affect the expression of these genes. DNA methylation can be measured with Illumina microarrays. In this paper, formal concept analysis (FCA) is used as data mining tool to visualize the DNA methylation status among breast cancer tumor subtypes, by building formal concepts which represent each subtypes as a set of significant methylated genes, then the formal context is built which leads to construct a concept lattice. The concept lattice is the hierarchical order of the set of all concepts. This lattice visualizes the status of hypermethylated or hypomethylated genes among subtypes.