Evolutionary fuzzy cluster analysis with Bayesian validation of gene expression profiles

Clustering analysis of the gene expression profiles has been used for identifying the functions of unknown genes. Fuzzy clustering method, which is one category of clustering, assigns one sample to multiple clusters as their degrees of membership. It is more appropriate for analyzing gene expression profiles because genes usually belong to multiple functional families. However, general clustering methods have problems that they are sensitive to initialization and can be trapped into local optima. In this paper, we propose an evolutionary fuzzy clustering method with Bayesian validation which uses a genetic algorithm for fuzzy clustering process of gene expression profiles and Bayesian validation method for the fitness evaluation process. We have conducted in-depth experiments to verify the usefulness of the proposed method with well-known gene expression profiles of SRBCT and Saccharomyces.