Biclustering expression data based on expanding localized substructures

Abstract

Biclustering gene expression data is the problem of extracting submatrices of genes and conditions exhibiting significant correlation across both the rows and the columns of a data matrix of expression values. We provide a method, LEB (Localize-and-Extract Biclusters) which reduces the search space into local neighborhoods within the matrix by first localizing correlated structures. The localization procedure takes its roots from effective use of graph-theoretical methods applied to problems exhibiting a similar structure to that of biclustering. Once interesting structures are localized the search space reduces to small neighborhoods and the biclusters are extracted from these localities. We evaluate the effectiveness of our method with extensive experiments both using artificial and real datasets.