Association Analysis Techniques for Bioinformatics Problems

Association analysis is one of the most popular analysis paradigms in data mining. Despite the solid foundation of association analysis and its potential applications, this group of techniques is not as widely used as classification and clustering, especially in the domain of bioinformatics and computational biology. In this paper, we present different types of association patterns and discuss some of their applications in bioinformatics. We present a case study showing the usefulness of association analysis-based techniques for pre-processing protein interaction networks for the task of protein function prediction. Finally, we discuss some of the challenges that need to be addressed to make association analysis-based techniques more applicable for a number of interesting problems in bioinformatics.