Interrelated two-way clustering and its application on gene expression data

Microarray technologies are capable of simultaneously measuring the signals for thousands of messenger RNAs and large numbers of proteins from single samples. Arrays are now widely used in basic biomedical research for mRNA expression profiling and are increasingly being used to explore patterns of gene expression in clinical research. Most research has focused on the interpretation of the meaning of the microarray data which are transformed into gene expression matrices where usually the rows represent genes, the columns represent various samples. Clustering samples can be done by analyzing and eliminating of irrelevant genes. However, majority methods are supervised (or assisted by domain knowledge), less attention has been paid on unsupervised approaches which are important when little domain knowledge is available. In this paper, we present a new framework for unsupervised analysis of gene expression data, which applies an interrelated two-way clustering approach on the gene expression matrices. The goal of clustering is to identify important genes and perform cluster discovery on samples. The advantage of this approach is that we can dynamically manipulate the relationship between the gene clusters and sample groups while conducting an iterative clustering through both of them. The performance of the proposed method with various gene expression data sets is also illustrated.