Current State-of-the-Art of Clustering Methods for Gene Expression Data with RNA-Seq

Abstract

Latest developments in high-throughput cDNA sequencing (RNA-seq) have revolutionized gene expression profiling. This analysis aims to compare the expression levels of multiple genes between two or more samples, under specific circumstances or in a specific cell to give a global picture of cellular function. Thanks to these advances, gene expression data are being generated in large throughput. One of the primary data analysis tasks for gene expression studies involves data-mining techniques such as clustering and classification. Clustering, which is an unsupervised learning technique, has been widely used as a computational tool to facilitate our understanding of gene functions and regulations involved in a biological process. Cluster analysis aims to group the large number of genes present in a sample of gene expression profile data, such that similar or related genes are in same clusters, and different or unrelated genes are in distinct ones. Classification on the other hand can be used for grouping samples based on their expression profile. There are many clustering and classification algorithms that can be applied in gene expression experiments, the most widely used are hierarchical clustering, k-means clustering and model-based clustering that depend on a model to sort out the number of clusters. Depending on the data structure, a fitting clustering method must be used. In this chapter, we present a state of art of clustering algorithms and statistical approaches for grouping similar gene expression profiles that can be applied to RNA-seq data analysis and software tools dedicated to these methods. In addition, we discuss challenges in cluster analysis, and compare the performance of height commonly used clustering methods on four different public datasets from recount2.