BackgroundAn important analysis performed on microarray gene-expression data is to discover biclusters, which denote groups of genes that are coherently expressed for a subset of conditions. Various biclustering algorithms have been proposed to find different types of biclusters from these real-valued gene-expression data sets. However, these algorithms suffer from several limitations such as inability to explicitly handle errorsoise in the data; difficulty in discovering small bicliusters due to their top-down approach; inability of some of the approaches to find overlapping biclusters, which is crucial as many genes participate in multiple biological processes. Association pattern mining also produce biclusters as their result and can naturally address some of these limitations. However, traditional association mining only finds exact biclusters, which limits its applicability in real-life data sets where the biclusters may be fragmented due to random noise/errors. Moreover, as they only work with binary or boolean attributes, their application on gene-expression data require transforming real-valued attributes to binary attributes, which often results in loss of information. Many past approaches have tried to address the issue of noise and handling real-valued attributes independently but there is no systematic approach that addresses both of these issues together.
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