A Multi-Objective Multipopulation Approach for Biclustering

摘要

Biclustering is a technique developed to allow simultaneous clustering of rows and columns of a dataset. This might be useful to extract more accurate information from sparse datasets and to avoid some of the drawbacks presented by standard clustering techniques, such as their impossibility of finding correlating data under a subset of features. Given that biclustering requires the optimization of two conflicting objectives (residue and volume) and that multiple independent solutions are desirable as the outcome, a multi-objective artificial immune system capable of performing a multipopulation search, named MOM-aiNet, will be proposed in this paper. To illustrate the capabilities of this novel algorithm, MOM-aiNet was applied to the extraction of biclusters from two datasets, one taken from a well-known gene expression problem and the other from a collaborative filtering application. A comparative analysis has also been accomplished, with the obtained results being confronted with the ones produced by two popular biclustering algorithms from the literature (FLOC and CC) and also by another immune-inspired approach for biclustering (BIC-aiNet).