New perspectives for the biclustering problem

Multimodal optimization algorithms inspired by the immune system are generally characterized by a dynamic control of the population size and by diversity maintenance along the search. One of these proposals, denoted copt-aiNet (artificial immune network for combinatorial optimization), is used to deal with combinatorial problems like the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) and other permutation problems. In this paper, the copt-aiNet algorithm is extended and adapted to be applied to an important issue of modern data mining, the biclustering problem. The biclustering approach consists in simultaneously ordering the rows and columns of a given matrix, so that similar elements are grouped together. To illustrate the performance of the proposed method, two bitmap images are scrambled and used as input to the algorithm, and the biclustering procedure tries to restore the original image by grouping the pixels according to the similarity of colors in a neighborhood. Additionally, copt-aiNet is applied to gene expression data clustering, a classical problem of the bioinformatics literature, and its performance is compared with a hierarchical biclustering algorithm.