Convex biclustering

In the biclustering problem, we seek to simultaneously group observations and features. While biclustering has applications in a wide array of domains, ranging from text mining to collaborative filtering, the problem of identifying structure in high-dimensional genomic data motivates this work. In this context, biclustering enables us to identify subsets of genes that are co-expressed only within a subset of experimental conditions. We present a convex formulation of the biclustering problem that possesses a unique global minimizer and an iterative algorithm, COBRA, that is guaranteed to identify it. Our approach generates an entire solution path of possible biclusters as a single tuning parameter is varied. We also show how to reduce the problem of selecting this tuning parameter to solving a trivial modification of the convex biclustering problem. The key contributions of our work are its simplicity, interpretability, and algorithmic guarantees-features that arguably are lacking in the current alternative algorithms. We demonstrate the advantages of our approach, which includes stably and reproducibly identifying biclusterings, on simulated and real microarray data.