A probabilistic relaxation labeling framework for reducing the noise effect in geometric biclustering of gene expression data

Biclustering is an important method in DNA microarray analysis which can be applied when only a subset of genes is co-expressed in a subset of conditions. Unlike standard clustering analyses, biclustering methodology can perform simultaneous classification on two dimensions of genes and conditions in a microarray data matrix. However, the performance of biclustering algorithms is affected by the inherent noise in data, types of biclusters and computational complexity. In this paper, we present a geometric biclustering method based on the Hough transform and the relaxation labeling technique. Unlike many existing biclustering algorithms, we first consider the biclustering patterns through geometric interpretation. Such a perspective makes it possible to unify the formulation of different types of biclusters as hyperplanes in spatial space and facilitates the use of a generic plane finding algorithm for bicluster detection. In our algorithm, the Hough transform is employed for hyperplane detection in sub-spaces to reduce the computational complexity. Then sub-biclusters are combined into larger ones under the probabilistic relaxation labeling framework. Our simulation studies demonstrate the robustness of the algorithm against noise and outliers. In addition, our method is able to extract biologically meaningful biclusters from real microarray gene expression data.