Identifying projected clusters from gene expression profiles

Abstract

In microarray gene expression data, clusters may hide in certain subspaces. For example, a set of co-regulated genes may have similar expression patterns in only a subset of the samples in which certain regulating factors are present. Their expression patterns could be dissimilar when measuring in the full input space. Traditional clustering algorithms that make use of such similarity measurements may fail to identify the clusters. In recent years a number of algorithms have been proposed to identify this kind of projected clusters, but many of them rely on some critical parameters whose proper values are hard for users to determine. In this paper, a new algorithm that dynamically adjusts its internal thresholds is proposed. It has a low dependency on user parameters while allowing users to input some domain knowledge should they be available. Experimental results show that the algorithm is capable of identifying some interesting projected clusters. © 2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.