Fuzzy Cluster Analysis of Gene Expression Profiles Using Evolutionary Computation and Adaptive ${\alpha}$-cut based Evaluation

Clustering is one of widely used methods for grouping thousands of genes by their similarities of expression levels, so that it helps to analyze gene expression profiles. This method has been used for identifying the functions of genes. Fuzzy clustering method, which is one category of clustering, assigns one sample to multiple groups according to their degrees of membership. This method is more appropriate for analyzing gene expression profiles because single gene might involve multiple genetic functions. Clustering methods, however, have the problems that they are sensitive to initialization and can be trapped into local optima. To solve these problems, this paper proposes an evolutionary fuzzy clustering method, where adaptive a-cut based evaluation is used for the fitness evaluation to apply different criteria considering the characteristics of datasets to overcome the limitation of Bayesian validation method that applies the same criterion to all datasets. We have conducted experiments with SRBCT and yeast cell-cycle datasets and analyzed the results to confirm the usefulness of the proposed method.