Gene Expression Data Analysis Using Feature Weighted Robust Fuzzy c-Means Clustering

Clustering of gene expression data has been proven to be very useful in various applications, i.e., identifying the natural structure inherent in gene expression, understanding gene functions, mining relevant information from noisy data, and understanding gene regulation. In all these applications, genes, i.e., features, play a crucial role in characterizing them into different groups. These features may be relevant, irrelevant, or redundant, but they have different contributions during the clustering process. This paper presents a novel approach by considering the effect of features during the clustering process. In the proposed method, the fuzzy c-means the objective function is modified using a weighted Euclidean distance between the features with a monotonically decreasing function. The monotonically decreasing function helps control the features' contribution during the clustering process to partition the data into more relevant clusters. The proposed approach is validated, and performance is presented in various clustering performance measures on the different standard datasets. These clustering performance measures have also been compared with multiple state-of-the-art methods.