Hierarchical Multi-classification with Predictive Clustering Trees in Functional Genomics

摘要

This paper investigates how predictive clustering trees can be used to predict gene function in the genome of the yeast Saccha-romyces cerevisiae. We consider the MIPS FunCat classification scheme, in which each gene is annotated with one or more classes selected from a given functional class hierarchy. This setting presents two important challenges to machine learning: (1) each instance is labeled with a set of classes instead of just one class, and (2) the classes are structured in a hierarchy; ideally the learning algorithm should also take this hierarchical information into account. Predictive clustering trees generalize decision trees and can be applied to a wide range of prediction tasks by plugging in a suitable distance metric. We define an appropriate distance metric for hierarchical multi-classification and present experiments evaluating this approach on a number of data sets that are available for yeast.