Clustering has been one of the most popular approaches used in gene expression data analysis. A clustering method is typically
used to partition genes according to their similarity of expression under different conditions. However, it is often the case
that some genes behave similarly only on a subset of conditions and their behavior is uncorrelated over the rest of the conditions.
As traditional clustering methods will fail to identify such gene groups, the biclustering paradigm is introduced recently
to overcome this limitation. In contrast to traditional clustering, a biclustering method produces biclusters, each of which
identifies a set of genes and a set of conditions under which these genes behave similarly. The boundary of a bicluster is
usually fuzzy in practice as genes and conditions can belong to multiple biclusters at the same time but with different membership
degrees. However, to the best of our knowledge, a method that can discover fuzzy value-coherent biclusters is still missing.
In this paper, (i) we propose a new fuzzy bicluster model for value-coherent biclusters; (ii) based on this model, we define
an objective function whose minimum will characterize good fuzzy value-coherent biclusters; and (iii) we propose a genetic
algorithm based method, Genetic Fuzzy Biclustering Algorithm (GFBA), to identify fuzzy value-coherent biclusters. Our experiments
show that GFBA is very efficient in converging to the global optimum.
This work was partially supported by the Agricultural Experiment Station at the University of the District of Columbia (Project
No.: DC-0LIANG; Accession No.: 0203877).