Incorporating gene ontology into fuzzy relational clustering of microarray gene expression data

The product of gene expression works together in the cell for each living organism in order to achieve different biological processes. Many proteins are involved in different roles depending on the environment of the organism for the functioning of the cell. In this paper, we propose gene ontology (GO) annotations based semi-supervised clustering algorithm called GO fuzzy relational clustering (GO-FRC) where one gene is allowed to be assigned to multiple clusters which are the most biologically relevant behavior of genes. In the clustering process, GO-FRC utilizes useful biological knowledge which is available in the form of a gene ontology, as a prior knowledge along with the gene expression data. The prior knowledge helps to improve the coherence of the groups concerning the knowledge field. The proposed GO-FRC has been tested on the two yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) expression profiles datasets (Eisen and Dream5 yeast datasets) and compared with other state-of-the-art clustering algorithms. Experimental results imply that GO-FRC is able to produce more biologically relevant clusters with the use of the small amount of GO annotations.