Clustering Gene Expression Data Using Ant-based Heuristics

Abstract

We consider the problem of finding the clusters in novel datasets in which the number of clusters is not known a priori; and little or no additional information is available for users to adjust the parameters in a clustering algorithm. We address this problem using a stochastic algorithm named SATTA (Simplified Adaptive Time Dependent Transporter), which attempts to find clusters without requiring users to specify the number of clusters or adjust any parameters. SATTA is then compared with Expectation Maximization Clustering, which is also able to estimate the number clusters using the principle of maximum likelihood and find the underlying clusters without any human interventions. Our results on seven gene expression datasets show that SATTA significantly outperforms Expectation Maximization Clustering in terms of clustering accuracy and efficiency. We discuss the conceptual differences between SATTA and EMC, which suggests that SATTA is a more promising alternative approach than Expectation Maximization Clustering when little or no additional information is available for clustering novel datasets.