Parallelized evolutionary learning for detection of biclusters in gene expression data

The analysis of gene expression data obtained from microarray experiments is important for discovering the biological process of genes. Biclustering algorithms have been proven to be able to group the genes with similar expression patterns under a number of experimental conditions. In this paper, we propose a new biclustering algorithm based on evolutionary learning. By converting the biclustering problem into a common clustering problem, the algorithm can be applied in a search space constructed by the conditions. To further reduce the size of the search space, we randomly separate the full conditions into a number of condition subsets (subspaces), each of which has a smaller number of conditions. The algorithm is applied to each subspace and is able to discover bicluster seeds within a limited computing time. Finally, an expanding and merging procedure is employed to combine the bicluster seeds into larger biclusters according to a homogeneity criterion. We test the performance of the proposed algorithm using synthetic and real microarray data sets. Compared with several previously developed biclustering algorithms, our algorithm demonstrates a significant improvement in discovering additive biclusters.