Biclustering Bioinformatic Data Sets Using a Possibilistic Approach

Francesco Masulli

Associate Professor
University of Genova, Italy

Abstract

The analysis of genomic data from DNA microarray can produce a valuable information on the biological relevance of genes and correlations among them. In the last few years some biclustering techniques have been proposed and applied to this analysis. Biclustering is a machine learning task finding clusters of samples with similar characteristics together with features creating these similarities. When applied to genomic data it can allow us to identify genes with similar behavior with respect to different conditions. In this talk a new approach to the biclustering problem will be introduced as an extension of the Possibilistic Clustering paradigm. The proposed Possibilistic Biclustering algorithm finds one bicluster at a time, by assigning to each gene and to each condition a membership to the bicluster. Some results on oligonucleotide microarray data sets will be presented and compared with those obtained using other biclustering methods.

Speaker Bio

Francesco Masulli is an Associate Professor of Computer Science with the University of Genova (Italy). He received the Laurea degree in Physics from the University of Genova in 1976. After the military service, he was a researcher with the Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics (1978-1979), and with the Ansaldo Automazione Co. (1979-1983), an Assistant Professor with the University of Genova (1983-2001), and an Associate Professor with the University of Pisa (2001-2005). He was also on leave as a visiting scientist at the University of Nijmegen, Holland (1983), and at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, California (1991, 1993, and 1994). He published more than 120 scientific papers on Machine Learning, Neural Networks, Fuzzy Systems, Ensemble Methods, and Bionformatics and co-edited seven books and five special issues of scientific journals on those subjects. He serves as a co-chair of the SIG on Bioinformatics of the International Neural Network Society (INNS) and as an Associate Editor the international journal "Intelligent Automation and Soft Computing". His previous duties include the chairing of the 2002 Course of the International School on Neural Networks "E.R.Caianiello" on "Ensemble Methods in Learning Machines?, and of some editions of the International Workshop on Fuzzy Logic and Applications (WILF) and of the International Meeting on Computational Intelligence Methods for Bioinformatics and Biostatistics (CIBB).