An Efficient Biclustering Algorithm for Finding Genes with Similar Patterns in Time-series Expression Data

Biclustering algorithms have emerged as an important tool for the discovery of local patterns in gene expression data. For the case where the expression data corresponds to time-series, efficient algorithms that work with a discretized version of the expression matrix are known. However, these algorithms assume that the biclusters to be found are perfect, in the sense that each gene in the bicluster exhibits exactly the same expression pattern along the conditions that belong to it. In this work, we propose an algorithm that identifies genes with similar, but not necessarily equal, expression patterns, over a subset of the conditions. The results demonstrate that this approach identifies biclusters biologically more significant than those discovered by other algorithms in the literature.